THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


TALES  OF  WAR 


TALES  OF  WAR 


BY 
LORD  DUNSANY 


BOSTON 

LITTLE,  BROWN,  AND  COMPANY 
1918 


Copyright,  1918, 
BY  LITTLE,  BKOWN,  AND  COMPANY. 

All  rights  reserved 


Nortoooli 
Set  up  and  electrotypcd  by  J.  S.  Gushing  Co.,  Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


College 

Library 

PR 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

I    THE  PRAYER  OF  THE  MEN  OF  DALES- 

WOOD    .......  1 

H    THE  ROAD        ......  15 

III  AN  IMPERIAL  MONUMENT        ...  20 

IV  A  WALK  TO  THE  TRENCHES    ...  25 
V    A  WALK  IN  PICARDY       ....  30 

VI  WHAT  HAPPENED  ON  THE  NIGHT  OF  THE 

TWENTY-SEVENTH          ....       35 

VII  STANDING  To  .         .         .         .         .         .41 

VIII  THE  SPLENDID  TRAVELLER      ...      44 

IX  ENGLAND          ......      48 

X  SHELLS     .......      53 

XI  Two  DEGREES  OF  ENVY          ...      58 

XII  THE  MASTER  OF  No  MAN'S  LAND          .       62 

XIII  WEEDS  AND  WIRE   .....       65 

XIV  SPRING  IN  ENGLAND  AND  FLANDERS       .      69 
XV  THE  NIGHTMARE  COUNTRIES  .         .         .73 

XVI     SPRING  AND  THE  KAISER         ...       78 
XVII    Two  SONGS      ......      81 

XVIII     THE  PUNISHMENT    .         .        .  .84 

XIX    THE  ENGLISH  SPIRIT       ....       92 

v 


1157481 


VI 


CONTENTS 


XX  AN  INVESTIGATION  INTO  THE  CAUSES  AND 

ORIGIN  OF  THE  WAR   ....      98 

XXI  LOST 106 

XXII  THE  LAST  MIRAGE  .         .         .         .110 

XXIII  A  FAMOUS  MAN 115 

XXIV  THE  OASES  OF  DEATH    .         .         .         .120 
XXV  ANGLO-SAXON  TYRANNY  .         .         .         .123 

XXVI  MEMORIES 128 

XXVH  THE  MOVEMENT 133 

XXVIH  NATURE'S  CAD 139 

XXIX  THE  HOME  OF  HERR  SCHNITZELHAASER      146 

XXX  A  DEED  OF  MERCY         ....     154 

XXXI  LAST  SCENE  OF  ALL        ....     158 

XXXII  OLD  ENGLAND  162 


THE  PRAYER  OF  THE  MEN  OF 
DALESWOOD 

HE    said:     'There   were    only   twenty 
houses  in  Daleswood.     A  place  you 
would  scarcely  have  heard  of.     A  village 
up  top  of  the  hills. 

"When  the  war  came  there  was  no  more 
than  thirty  men  there  between  sixteen  and 
forty-five.  They  all  went. 

'They  all  kept  together ;  same  battalion, 
same  platoon.  They  was  like  that  in  Dales- 
wood.  Used  to  call  the  hop  pickers  foreign- 
ers, the  ones  that  come  from  London.  They 
used  to  go  past  Daleswood,  some  of  them, 
every  year,  on  their  way  down  to  the  hop 
fields.  Foreigners  they  used  to  call  them. 
Kept  very  much  to  themselves,  did  the 
Daleswood  people.  Big  woods  all  round 
them. 

i 


2  TALES  OF  WAR 

"Very  lucky  they  was,  the  Daleswood 
men.  They'd  lost  no  more  than  five  killed 
and  a  good  sprinkling  of  wounded.  But  all 
the  wounded  was  back  again  with  the  pla- 
toon. This  was  up  to  March  when  the  big 
offensive  started. 

"It  came  very  sudden.  No  bombard- 
ment to  speak  of.  Just  a  burst  of  Tok 
Emmas  going  off  all  together  and  lifting 
the  front  trench  clean  out  of  it ;  then  a 
barrage  behind,  and  the  Boche  pouring  over 
in  thousands.  'Our  luck  is  holding  good/ 
the  Daleswood  men  said,  for  their  trench 
wasn't  getting  it  at  all.  But  the  platoon 
on  their  right  got  it.  And  it  sounded  bad 
too  a  long  way  beyond  that.  No  one  could 
be  quite  sure.  But  the  platoon  on  their 
right  was  getting  it :  that  was  sure  enough. 

"And  then  the  Boche  got  through  them 
altogether.  A  message  came  to  say  so. 
*  How  are  things  on  the  right  ? '  they  said  to 
the  runner.  'Bad,'  said  the  runner,  and 
he  went  back,  though  Lord  knows  what  he 
went  back  to.  The  Boche  was  through  right 


THE  MEN  OF  DALESWOOD       3 

enough.  'We'll  have  to  make  a  defensive 
flank,'  said  the  platoon  commander.  He 
was  a  Dales  wood  man  too.  Came  from 
the  big  farm.  He  slipped  down  a  com- 
munication trench  with  a  few  men,  mostly 
bombers.  And  they  reckoned  they 
wouldn't  see  any  of  them  any  more,  for 
the  Boche  was  on  the  right,  thick  as  star- 
lings. 

:'The  bullets  were  snapping  over  thick 
to  keep  them  down  while  the  Boche  went 
on,  on  the  right :  machine  guns,  of  course. 
The  barrage  was  screaming  well  over  and 
dropping  far  back,  and  their  wire  was  still 
all  right  just  in  front  of  them,  when  they 
put  up  a  head  to  look.  There  was  the 
left  platoon  of  the  battalion.  One  doesn't 
bother,  somehow,  so  much  about  another 
battalion  as  one's  own.  One's  own  gets 
sort  of  homely.  And  there  they  were  won- 
dering how  their  own  officer  was  getting 
on,  and  the  few  fellows  with  them,  on  his 
defensive  flank.  The  bombs  were  going 
off  thick.  All  the  Daleswood  men  were 


4  TALES   OP  WAR 

firing  half  right.  It  sounded  from  the 
noise  as  if  it  couldn't  last  long,  as  if  it 
would  soon  be  decisive,  and  the  battle  be 
won,  or  lost,  just  there  on  the  right,  and 
perhaps  the  war  ended.  They  didn't  notice 
the  left.  Nothing  to  speak  of. 

'Then  a  runner  came  from  the  left. 
'  Hullo ! '  they  said,  '  How  are  things  over 
there?' 

" '  The  Boche  is  through,'  he  said. 
'Where's  the  officer?'  'Through!'  they 
said.  It  didn't  seem  possible.  However 
did  he  do  that?  they  thought.  And  the 
runner  went  on  to  the  right  to  look  for  the 
officer. 

"And  then  the  barrage  shifted  further 
back.  The  shells  still  screamed  over  them, 
but  the  bursts  were  further  away.  That 
is  always  a  relief.  Probably  they  felt  it. 
But  it  was  bad  for  all  that.  Very  bad. 
It  meant  the  Boche  was  well  past  them. 
They  realized  it  after  a  while. 

"They  and  their  bit  of  wire  were  somehow 
just  between  two  waves  of  attack.  Like 


THE   MEN  OF   DALESWOOD       5 

a  bit  of  stone  on  the  beach  with  the  sea 
coming  in.  A  platoon  was  nothing  to  the 
Boche ;  nothing  much  perhaps  just  then 
to  anybody.  But  it  was  the  whole  of 
Daleswood  for  one  long  generation. 

'The  youngest  full-grown  man  they  had 
left  behind  was  fifty,  and  some  one  had 
heard  that  he  had  died  since  the  war.  There 
was  no  one  else  in  Daleswood  but  women 
and  children,  and  boys  up  to  seventeen. 

"The  bombing  had  stopped  on  their 
right ;  everything  was  quieter,  and  the 
barrage  further  away.  When  they  began 
to  realize  what  that  meant  they  began  to 
talk  of  Daleswood.  And  then  they  thought 
that  when  all  of  them  were  gone  there  would 
be  nobody  who  would  remember  Dales- 
wood  just  as  it  used  to  be.  For  places 
alter  a  little,  woods  grow,  and  changes 
come,  trees  get  cut  down,  old  people  die ; 
new  houses  are  built  now  and  then  in 
place  of  a  yew  tree,  or  any  old  thing,  that 
used  to  be  there  before ;  and  one  way  or 
another  the  old  things  go ;  and  all  the 


6  TALES   OF  WAR 

time  you  have  people  thinking  that  the 
old  times  were  best,  and  the  old  ways 
when  they  were  young.  And  the  Dales- 
wood  men  were  beginning  to  say,  'Who 
would  there  be  to  remember  it  just  as  it 
was  ? ' 

"There  was  no  gas,  the  wind  being  wrong 
for  it,  so  they  were  able  to  talk,  that  is  if 
they  shouted,  for  the  bullets  alone  made 
as  much  noise  as  breaking  up  an  old  shed, 
crisper  like,  more  like  new  timber  break- 
ing; and  the  shells  of  course  was  howling 
all  the  time,  that  is  the  barrage  that  was 
bursting  far  back.  The  trench  still  stank 
of  them. 

:'They  said  that  one  of  them  must  go 
over  and  put  his  hands  up,  or  run  away  if 
he  could,  whichever  he  liked,  and  when  the 
war  was  over  he  would  go  to  some  writing 
fellow,  one  of  those  what  makes  a  living 
by  it,  and  tell  him  all  about  Daleswood, 
just  as  it  used  to  be,  and  he  would  write 
it  out  proper  and  there  it  would  be  for  al- 
ways. They  all  agreed  to  that.  And  then 


THE   MEN  OF  DALESWOOD       7 

they  talked  a  bit,  as  well  as  they  could 
above  that  awful  screeching,  to  try  and 
decide  who  it  should  be.  The  eldest,  they 
said,  would  know  Daleswood  best.  But 
he  said,  and  they  came  to  agree  with  him, 
that  it  would  be  a  sort  of  waste  to  save  the 
life  of  a  man  what  had  had  his  good  time, 
and  they  ought  to  send  the  youngest,  and 
they  would  tell  him  all  they  knew  of 
Daleswood  before  his  time,  and  every- 
thing would  be  written  down  just  the  same 
and  the  old  time  remembered. 

'They  had  the  idea  somehow  that  the 
women  thought  more  of  their  own  man 
and  their  children  and  the  washing  and 
what-not ;  and  that  the  deep  woods  and 
the  great  hills  beyond,  and  the  ploughing 
and  the  harvest  and  snaring  rabbits  in 
winter  and  the  sports  in  the  village  in 
summer,  and  the  hundred  things  that  pass 
the  time  of  one  generation  in  an  old,  old 
place  like  Daleswood,  meant  less  to  them 
than  the  men.  Anyhow  they  did  not  quite 
seem  to  trust  them  with  the  past. 


8  TALES  OF  WAR 

"The  youngest  of  them  was  only  just 
eighteen.  That  was  Dick.  They  told  him 
to  get  out  and  put  his  hands  up  and  be 
quick  getting  across,  as  soon  as  they  had 
told  him  one  or  two  things  about  the  old 
time  in  Daleswood  that  a  youngster  like 
him  wouldn't  know. 

"Well,  Dick  said  he  wasn't  going,  and 
was  making  trouble  about  it,  so  they  told 
Fred  to  go.  Back,  they  told  him,  was 
best,  and  come  up  behind  the  Boche  with 
his  hands  up ;  they  would  be  less  likely  to 
shoot  when  it  was  back  towards  their  own 
supports. 

"Fred  wouldn't  go,  and  so  on  with  the 
rest.  Well,  they  didn't  waste  time  quarrel- 
ling, time  being  scarce,  and  they  said  what 
was  to  be  done?  There  was  chalk  where 
they  were,  low  down  in  the  trench,  a  little 
brown  clay  on  the  top  of  it.  There  was  a 
great  block  of  it  loose  near  a  shelter.  They 
said  they  would  carve  with  their  knives 
on  the  big  bowlder  of  chalk  all  that  they 
knew  about  Daleswood.  They  would  write 


THE   MEN  OF  DALESWOOD       9 

where  it  was  and  just  what  it  was  like, 
and  they  would  write  something  of  all 
those  little  things  that  pass  with  a  genera- 
tion. They  reckoned  on  having  the  time 
for  it.  It  would  take  a  direct  hit  with 
something  large,  what  they  call  big  stuff, 
to  do  any  harm  to  that  bowlder.  They  had 
no  confidence  in  paper,  it  got  so  messed 
up  when  you  were  hit;  besides,  the  Boche 
had  been  using  thermite.  Burns,  that  does. 

''They'd  one  or  two  men  that  were 
handy  at  carving  chalk;  used  to  do  the 
regimental  crest  and  pictures  of  Hinden- 
burg,  and  all  that.  They  decided  they'd 
do  it  in  reliefs. 

'They  started  smoothing  the  chalk. 
They  had  nothing  more  to  do  but  just 
to  think  what  to  write.  It  was  a  great 
big  bowlder  with  plenty  of  room  on  it. 
The  Boche  seemed  not  to  know  that  they 
hadn't  killed  the  Daleswood  men,  just  as 
the  sea  mightn't  know  that  one  stone 
stayed  dry  at  the  coming  in  of  the  tide. 
A  gap  between  two  divisions  probably. 


10  TALES  OF  WAR 

"Harry  wanted  to  tell  of  the  woods 
more  than  anything.  He  was  afraid  they 
might  cut  them  down  because  of  the  war, 
and  no  one  would  know  of  the  larks  they 
had  had  there  as  boys.  Wonderful  old 
woods  they  were,  with  a  lot  of  Spanish 
chestnut  growing  low,  and  tall  old  oaks 
over  it.  Harry  wanted  them  to  write 
down  what  the  foxgloves  were  like  in  the 
wood  at  the  end  of  summer,  standing  there 
in  the  evening,  'Great  solemn  rows,'  he 
said,  'all  odd  in  the  dusk.  All  odd  in  the 
evening,  going  there  after  work ;  and  makes 
you  think  of  fairies.'  There  was  lots  of 
things  about  those  woods,  he  said,  that 
ought  to  be  put  down  if  people  were  to 
remember  Daleswood  as  it  used  to  be 
when  they  knew  it.  What  were  the  good 
old  days  without  those  woods  ?  he  said. 

"But  another  wanted  to  tell  of  the  time 
when  they  cut  the  hay  with  scythes, 
working  all  those  long  days  at  the  end  of 
June ;  there  would  be  no  more  of  that,  he 
said,  with  machines  come  in  and  all. 


THE  MEN  OF  DALESWOOD     11 

"There  was  room  to  tell  of  all  that  and 
the  woods  too,  said  the  others,  so  long  as 
they  put  it  short  like. 

"And  another  wanted  to  tell  of  the 
valleys  beyond  the  wood,  far  afield  where 
the  men  went  working;  the  women  would 
remember  the  hay.  The  great  valleys  he'd 
tell  of.  It  was  they  that  made  Daleswood. 
The  valleys  beyond  the  wood  and  the 
twilight  on  them  in  summer.  Slopes 
covered  with  mint  and  thyme,  all  solemn 
at  evening.  A  hare  on  them  perhaps, 
sitting  as  though  they  were  his,  then 
lolloping  slowly  away.  It  didn't  seem 
from  the  way  he  told  of  those  old  valleys 
that  he  thought  they  could  ever  be  to 
other  folk  what  they  were  to  the  Dales- 
wood  men  in  the  days  he  remembered. 
He  spoke  of  them  as  though  there  were 
something  in  them,  besides  the  mint  and 
the  thyme  and  the  twilight  and  hares, 
that  would  not  stay  after  these  men  were 
gone,  though  he  did  not  say  what  it  was. 
Scarcely  hinted  it  even. 


12  TALES  OF  WAR 

"And  still  the  Boche  did  nothing  to  the 
Daleswood  men.  The  bullets  had  ceased 
altogether.  That  made  it  much  quieter. 
The  shells  still  snarled  over,  bursting  far, 
far  away. 

"And  Bob  said  tell  of  Daleswood  itself, 
the  old  village,  with  queer  chimneys,  of 
red  brick,  in  the  wood.  There  weren't 
houses  like  that  nowadays.  They'd  be 
building  new  ones  and  spoiling  it,  likely, 
after  the  war.  And  that  was  all  he  had 
to  say. 

"And  nobody  was  for  not  pitting  down 
anything  any  one  said.  It  was  all  to  go 
in  on  the  chalk,  as  much  as  would  go  in 
the  time.  For  they  all  sort  of  understood 
that  the  Daleswood  of  what  they  called  the 
good  old  time  was  just  the  memories  that 
those  few  men  had  of  the  days  they  had 
spent  there  together.  And  that  was  the 
Daleswood  they  loved,  and  wanted  folks 
to  remember.  They  were  all  agreed  as 
to  that.  And  then  they  said  how  was 
they  to  write  it  down.  And  when  it  came 


THE   MEN  OF  DALESWOOD     13 

to  writing  there  was  so  much  to  be  said, 
not  spread  over  a  lot  of  paper  I  don't 
mean,  but  going  down  so  deep  like,  that 
it  seemed  to  them  how  their  own  talk 
wouldn't  be  good  enough  to  say  it.  And 
they  knew  no  other,  and  didn't  know  what 
to  do.  I  reckon  they'd  been  reading  maga- 
zines and  thought  that  writing  had  to  be 
like  that  muck.  Anyway,  they  didn't 
know  what  to  do.  I  reckon  their  talk 
would  be  good  enough  for  Daleswood  when 
they  loved  Daleswood  like  that.  But  they 
didn't,  and  they  were  puzzled. 

"The  Boche  was  miles  away  behind  them 
now,  and  his  barrage  with  him.  Still  in 
front  he  did  nothing. 

"They  talked  it  all  over  and  over,  did 
the  Daleswood  men.  They  tried  every- 
thing. But  somehow  or  other  they  couldn't 
get  near  what  they  wanted  to  say  about 
old  summer  evenings.  Time  wore  on.  The 
bowlder  was  smooth  and  ready,  and  that 
whole  generation  of  Daleswood  men  could 
find  no  words  to  say  what  was  in  their 


14  TALES  OF  WAR 

hearts  about  Daleswood.  There  wasn't 
time  to  waste.  And  the  only  thing  they 
thought  of  in  the  end  was  'Please,  God, 
remember  Daleswood  just  like  it  used  to 
be.*  And  Bill  and  Harry  carved  that  on 
the  chalk  between  them. 

"What  happened  to  the  Daleswood  men  ? 
Why,  nothing.  There  come  one  of  them 
counter-attacks,  a  regular  bastard  for  Jerry. 
The  French  made  it  and  did  the  Boche  in 
proper.  I  got  the  story  from  a  man  with  a 
hell  of  a  great  big  hammer,  long  after- 
wards when  that  trench  was  well  behind  our 
line.  He  was  smashing  up  a  huge  great 
chunk  of  chalk  because  he  said  they  all 
felt  it  was  so  damn  silly." 


II 

THE  ROAD 

THE  battery  Sergeant-Major  was  prac- 
tically asleep.  He  was  all  worn  out 
by  the  continuous  roar  of  bombardments 
that  had  been  shaking  the  dugouts  and 
dazing  his  brains  for  weeks.  He  was  pretty 
well  fed  up. 

The  officer  commanding  the  battery,  a 
young  man  in  a  very  neat  uniform  and  of 
particularly  high  birth,  came  up  and  spat 
in  his  face.  The  Sergeant-Major  sprang 
to  attention,  received  an  order,  and  took 
a  stick  at  once  and  beat  up  the  tired  men. 
For  a  message  had  come  to  the  battery 
that  some  English  (God  punish  them !) 
were  making  a  road  at  X. 

The  gun  was  fired.  It  was  one  of  those 
unlucky  shots  that  come  on  days  when 
our  luck  is  out.  The  shell,  a  5.9,  lit  in 

15 


16  TALES  OF  WAR 

the  midst  of  the  British  working  party. 
It  did  the  Germans  little  good.  It  did 
not  stop  the  deluge  of  shells  that  was 
breaking  up  their  guns  and  was  driving 
misery  down  like  a  wedge  into  their  spirits. 
It  did  not  improve  the  temper  of  the  officer 
commanding  the  battery,  so  that  the  men 
suffered  as  acutely  as  ever  under  the 
Sergeant-Major.  But  it  stopped  the  road 
for  that  day. 

I  seemed  to  see  that  road  going  on  in  a 
dream. 

Another  working  party  came  along  next 
day,  with  clay  pipes  and  got  to  work ; 
and  next  day  and  the  day  after.  Shells 
came,  but  went  short  or  over;  the  shell 
holes  were  neatly  patched  up ;  the  road 
went  on.  Here  and  there  a  tree  had  to  be 
cut,  but  not  often,  not  many  of  them  were 
left ;  it  was  mostly  digging  and  grubbing 
up  roots,  and  pushing  wheelbarrows  along 
planks  and  duck-boards,  and  filling  up  with 
stones.  Sometimes  the  engineers  would 
come  :  that  was  when  streams  were  crossed. 


THE   ROAD  17 

The  engineers  made  their  bridges,  and  the 
infantry  working  party  went  on  with  the 
digging  and  laying  down  stones.  It  was 
monotonous  work.  Contours  altered,  soil 
altered,  even  the  rock  beneath  it,  but  the 
desolation  never;  they  always  worked  in 
desolation  and  thunder.  And  so  the  road 
went  on. 

They  came  to  a  wide  river.  They  went 
through  a  great  forest.  They  passed  the 
ruins  of  what  must  have  been  quite  fine 
towns,  big  prosperous  towns  with  uni- 
versities in  them.  I  saw  the  infantry 
working  party  with  their  stumpy  clay  pipes, 
in  my  dream,  a  long  way  on  from  where 
that  shell  had  lit,  which  stopped  the  road 
for  a  day.  And  behind  them  curious 
changes  came  over  the  road  at  X.  You 
saw  the  infantry  going  up  to  the  trenches, 
and  going  back  along  it  into  reserve.  They 
marched  at  first,  but  in  a  few  days  they  were 
going  up  in  motors,  grey  busses  with 
shuttered  windows.  And  then  the  guns 
came  along  it,  miles  and  miles  of  guns, 


18  TALES  OF  WAR 

following  after  the  thunder  which  was 
further  off  over  the  hills.  And  then  one 
day  the  cavalry  came  by.  Then  stores 
in  wagons,  the  thunder  muttering  further 
and  further  away.  I  saw  farm-carts  going 
down  the  road  at  X.  And  then  one  day 
all  manner  of  horses  and  traps  and  laugh- 
ing people,  farmers  and  women  and  boys 
all  going  by  to  X.  There  was  going  to  be 
a  fair. 

And  far  away  the  road  was  growing 
longer  and  longer  amidst,  as  always,  deso- 
lation and  thunder.  And  one  day  far 
away  from  X  the  road  grew  very  fine 
indeed.  It  was  going  proudly  through  a 
mighty  city,  sweeping  in  like  a  river;  you 
would  not  think  that  it  ever  remembered 
duck-boards.  There  were  great  palaces 
there,  with  huge  armorial  eagles  blazoned 
in  stone,  and  all  along  each  side  of  the  road 
was  a  row  of  statues  of  kings.  And  going 
down  the  road  towards  the  palace,  past  the 
statues  of  the  kings,  a  tired  procession 
was  riding,  full  of  the  flags  of  the  Allies. 


THE  ROAD  19 

And  I  looked  at  the  flags  in  my  dream, 
out  of  national  pride  to  see  whether  we 
led,  or  whether  France  or  America.  Amer- 
ica went  before  us,  but  I  could  not  see  the 
Union  Jack  in  the  van,  nor  the  Tricolour 
either,  nor  the  Stars  and  Stripes  :  Belgium 
led  and  then  Serbia,  they  that  had  suffered 
most. 

And  before  the  flags,  and  before  the 
generals,  I  saw  marching  along  on  foot 
the  ghosts  of  the  working  party  that  were 
killed  at  X,  gazing  about  them  in  admira- 
tion as  they  went,  at  the  great  city  and  at 
the  palaces.  And  one  man,  wondering  at 
the  Sieges  Allee,  turned  round  to  the 
Lance  Corporal  in  charge  of  the  party : 
"That  is  a  fine  road  that  we  made,  Frank," 
he  said. 


Ill 

AN  IMPERIAL  MONUMENT 

IT  is  an  early  summer's  morning:  the 
dew  is  all  over  France :  the  train  is 
going  eastwards.  They  are  quite  slow, 
those  troop  trains,  and  there  are  few  em- 
bankments or  cuttings  in  those  flat  plains, 
so  that  you  seem  to  be  meandering  along 
through  the  very  life  of  the  people.  The 
roads  come  right  down  to  the  railways, 
and  the  sun  is  shining  brightly  over  the 
farms  and  the  people  going  to  work  along 
the  roads,  so  that  you  can  see  their  faces 
clearly  as  the  slow  train  passes  them  by. 

They  are  all  women  and  boys  that  work 
on  the  farms;  sometimes  perhaps  you  see 
a  very  old  man,  but  nearly  always  women 
and  boys;  they  are  out  working  early. 
They  straighten  up  from  their  work  as  we 
go  by  and  lift  their  hands  to  bless  us. 

20 


AN  IMPERIAL  MONUMENT    21 

We  pass  by  long  rows  of  the  tall  French 
poplars,  their  branches  cut  away  all  up 
the  trunk,  leaving  only  an  odd  round  tuft 
at  the  top  of  the  tree;  but  little  branches 
are  growing  all  up  the  trunk  now,  and  the 
poplars  are  looking  unkempt.  It  would 
be  the  young  men  who  would  cut  the 
branches  of  the  poplars.  They  would  cut 
them  for  some  useful  thrifty  purpose  that 
I  do  not  know ;  and  then  they  would  cut 
them  because  they  were  always  cut  that 
way,  as  long  ago  as  the  times  of  the  old 
men's  tales  about  France ;  but  chiefly,  I 
expect,  because  youth  likes  to  climb  diffi- 
cult trees ;  that  is  why  they  are  clipped  so 
very  high.  And  the  trunks  are  all  un- 
kempt now. 

We  go  on  by  many  farms  with  their 
shapely  red-roofed  houses;  they  stand 
there,  having  the  air  of  the  homes  of  an 
ancient  people ;  they  would  not  be  out 
of  keeping  with  any  romance  that  might 
come,  or  any  romance  that  has  come  in 
the  long  story  of  France,  and  the  girls  of 


22  TALES  OF  WAR 

those  red-roofed  houses  work  all  alone  in 
the  fields. 

We  pass  by  many  willows  and  come  to  a 
great  marsh.  In  a  punt  on  some  open 
water  an  old  man  is  angling.  We  come  to 
fields  again,  and  then  to  a  deep  wood. 
France  smiles  about  us  in  the  open  sunlight. 

But  towards  evening  we  pass  over  the 
border  of  this  pleasant  country  into  a 
tragical  land  of  destruction  and  gloom. 
It  is  not  only  that  murder  has  walked 
here  to  and  fro  for  years,  until  all  the  fields 
are  ominous  with  it,  but  the  very  fields 
themselves  have  been  mutilated  until  they 
are  unlike  fields,  the  woods  have  been 
shattered  right  down  to  the  anemones,  and 
the  houses  have  been  piled  in  heaps  of 
rubbish,  and  the  heaps  of  rubbish  have 
been  scattered  by  shells.  We  see  no  more 
trees,  no  more  houses,  no  more  women,  no 
cattle  even  now.  We  have  come  to  the 
abomination  of  desolation.  And  over  it 
broods,  and  will  probably  brood  for  ever, 
accursed  by  men  and  accursed  by  the  very 


AN  IMPERIAL  MONUMENT    23 

fields,  the  hyena-like  memory  of  the  Kaiser, 
who  has  whitened  so  many  bones. 

It  may  be  some  satisfaction  to  his  selfish- 
ness to  know  that  the  monument  to  it 
cannot  pass  away,  to  know  that  the  shell 
holes  go  too  deep  to  be  washed  away  by  the 
healing  rains  of  years,  to  know  that  the 
wasted  German  generations  will  not  in 
centuries  gather  up  what  has  been  spilt 
on  the  Somme,  or  France  recover  in  the 
sunshine  of  many  summers  from  all  the 
misery  that  his  devilish  folly  has  caused. 
It  is  likely  to  be  to  such  as  him  a  source  of 
satisfaction,  for  the  truly  vain  care  only 
to  be  talked  of  in  many  mouths ;  they 
hysterically  love  to  be  thought  of,  and  the 
notice  of  mankind  is  to  them  a  mirror  which 
reflects  their  futile  postures.  The  admira- 
tion of  fools  they  love,  and  the  praise  of  a 
slavelike  people,  but  they  would  sooner  be 
hated  by  mankind  than  be  ignored  and 
forgotten  as  is  their  due.  And  the  truly 
selfish  care  only  for  their  imperial  selves. 

Let   us   leave   him   to   pass   in   thought 


24  TALES  OF  WAR 

from  ruin  to  ruin,  from  wasted  field  to 
field,  from  crater  to  crater ;  let  us  leave 
his  fancy  haunting  cemeteries  in  the  stricken 
lands  of  the  world,  to  find  what  glee  he 
can  in  this  huge  manifestation  of  his  im- 
perial will. 

We  neither  know  to  what  punishment  he 
moves  nor  can  even  guess  what  fitting  one 
is  decreed.  But  the  time  is  surely  ap- 
pointed and  the  place.  Poor  trifler  with 
Destiny,  who  ever  had  so  much  to  dread  ? 


IV 
A  WALK  TO  THE  TRENCHES 

TO  stand  at  the  beginning  of  a  road  is 
always  wonderful ;  for  on  all  roads 
before  they  end  experience  lies,  sometimes 
adventure.  And  a  trench,  even  as  a  road, 
has  its  beginnings  somewhere.  In  the  heart 
of  a  very  strange  country  you  find  them 
suddenly.  A  trench  may  begin  in  the 
ruins  of  a  house,  may  run  up  out  of  a  ditch ; 
may  be  cut  into  a  rise  of  ground  sheltered 
under  a  hill,  and  is  built  in  many  ways  by 
many  men.  As  to  who  is  the  best  builder 
of  trenches  there  can  be  little  doubt,  and 
any  British  soldier  would  probably  admit 
that  for  painstaking  work  and  excellence 
of  construction  there  are  few  to  rival  Von 
Hindenburg.  His  Hindenburg  line  is  a 
model  of  neatness  and  comfort,  and  it 

25 


26  TALES  OF  WAR 

would  be  only  a  very  ungrateful  British 
soldier  who  would  deny  it. 

You  come  to  the  trenches  out  of  strangely 
wasted  lands,  you  come  perhaps  to  a  wood 
in  an  agony  of  contortions,  black,  branch- 
less, sepulchral  trees,  and  then  no  more 
trees  at  all.  The  country  after  that  is 
still  called  Picardy  or  Belgium,  still  has  its 
old  name  on  the  map  as  though  it  smiled 
there  yet,  sheltering  cities  and  hamlet 
and  radiant  with  orchards  and  gardens, 
but  the  country  named  Belgium  —  or  what- 
ever it  be  —  is  all  gone  away,  and  there 
stretches  for  miles  instead  one  of  the  world's 
great  deserts,  a  thing  to  take  its  place  no 
longer  with  smiling  lands,  but  with  Sahara, 
Gobi,  Kalahari,  and  the  Karoo ;  not  to 
be  thought  of  as  Picardy,  but  more  suit- 
ably to  be  named  the  Desert  of  Wilhelm. 
Through  these  sad  lands  one  goes  to  come 
to  the  trenches.  Overhead  floats  until  it 
is  chased  away  an  aeroplane  with  little 
black  crosses,  that  you  can  scarcely  see 
at  his  respectful  height,  peering  to  see  what 


A  WALK  TO  THE  TRENCHES    27 

more  harm  may  be  done  in  the  desolation 
and  ruin.  Little  flashes  sparkle  near  him, 
white  puffs  spread  out  round  the  flashes : 
and  he  goes,  and  our  airmen  go  away  after 
him ;  black  puffs  break  out  round  our  air- 
men. Up  in  the  sky  you  hear  a  faint  tap- 
tapping.  They  have  got  their  machine  guns 
working. 

You  see  many  things  there  that  are 
unusual  in  deserts,  a  good  road,  a  railway, 
perhaps  a  motor  bus ;  you  see  what  was 
obviously  once  a  village,  and  hear  English 
songs,  but  no  one  who  has  not  seen  it  can 
imagine  the  country  in  which  the  trenches 
lie,  unless  he  bear  a  desert  clearly  in  mind, 
a  desert  that  has  moved  from  its  place  on 
the  map  by  some  enchantment  of  wizardry, 
and  come  down  on  a  smiling  country. 
Would  it  not  be  glorious  to  be  a  Kaiser  and 
be  able  to  do  things  like  that  ? 

Past  all  manner  of  men,  past  no  trees, 
no  hedges,  no  fields,  but  only  one  field  from 
skyline  to  skyline  that  has  been  harrowed 
by  war,  one  goes  with  companions  that 


28  TALES  OF  WAR 

this  event  in  our  history  has  drawn  from  all 
parts  of  the  earth.  On  that  road  you  may 
hear  all  in  one  walk  where  is  the  best  place 
to  get  lunch  in  the  City ;  you  may  hear  how 
they  laid  a  drag  for  some  Irish  pack,  and 
what  the  Master  said ;  you  may  hear  a 
farmer  lamenting  over  the  harm  that  rhi- 
noceroses do  to  his  coffee  crop ;  you  may 
hear  Shakespeare  quoted  and  La  Vie  Pari- 
sienne. 

In  the  village  you  see  a  lot  of  German 
orders,  with  their  silly  notes  of  exclama- 
tion after  them,  written  up  on  notice  boards 
among  the  ruins.  Ruins  and  German 
orders.  That  turning  movement  of  Von 
Kluck's  near  Paris  in  1914  was  a  mistake. 
Had  he  not  done  it  we  might  have  had 
ruins  and  German  orders  everywhere.  And 
yetT  Von  Kluck  may  comfort  himself  with 
the  thought  that  it  is  not  by  his  mistakes 
that  Destiny  shapes  the  world :  such  a 
nightmare  as  a  world-wide  German  domina- 
tion can  have  had  no  place  amongst  the 
scheme  of  things. 


A  WALK  TO  THE  TRENCHES    29 

Beyond  the  village  the  batteries  are 
thick.  A  great  howitzer  near  the  road  lifts 
its  huge  muzzle  slowly,  fires  and  goes  down 
again,  and  lifts  again  and  fires.  It  is  as 
though  Polyphemus  had  lifted  his  huge 
shape  slowly,  leisurely,  from  the  hillside 
where  he  was  sitting,  and  hurled  the 
mountain  top,  and  sat  down  again.  If  he 
is  firing  pretty  regularly  you  are  sure  to 
get  the  blast  of  one  of  them  as  you  go  by, 
and  it  can  be  a  very  strong  wind  indeed. 
One's  horse,  if  one  is  riding,  does  not  very 
much  like  it,  but  I  have  seen  horses  far 
more  frightened  by  a  puddle  on  the  road 
when  coming  home  from  hunting  in  the 
evening :  one  12-inch  howitzer  more  or 
less  in  France  calls  for  no  great  attention 
from  man  or  beast. 

And  so  we  come  in  sight  of  the  support 
trenches  where  we  are  to  dwell  for  a  week 
before  we  go  on  for  another  mile  over  the 
hills,  where  the  black  fountains  are  rising. 


A  WALK  IN  PICARDY 

PICTURE  any  village  you  know.  In 
such  a  village  as  that  the  trench 
begins.  That  is  to  say,  there  are  duck- 
boards  along  a  ditch,  and  the  ditch  runs 
into  a  trench.  Only  the  village  is  no 
longer  there.  It  was  like  some  village  you 
know,  though  perhaps  a  little  merrier, 
because  it  was  further  south  and  nearer 
the  sun ;  but  it  is  all  gone  now.  And  the 
trench  runs  out  of  the  ruins,  and  is  called 
Windmill  Avenue.  There  must  have  been 
a  windmill  standing  there  once. 

When  you  come  from  the  ditch  to  the 
trench  you  leave  the  weeds  and  soil  and 
trunks  of  willows  and  see  the  bare  chalk. 
At  the  top  of  those  two  white  walls  is  a 
foot  or  so  of  brown  clay.  The  brown  clay 
grows  deeper  as  you  come  to  the  hills, 

30 


A  WALK  IN  PICARDY          31 

until  the  chalk  has  disappeared  altogether. 
Our  alliance  with  France  is  new  in  the 
history  of  man,  but  it  is  an  old,  old  union 
in  the  history  of  the  hills.  White  chalk 
with  brown  clay  on  top  has  dipped  and 
gone  under  the  sea ;  and  the  hills  of  Sussex 
and  Kent  are  one  with  the  hills  of  Picardy. 

And  so  you  may  pass  through  the  chalk 
that  lies  in  that  desolate  lane  with  memories 
of  more  silent  and  happier  hills ;  it  all 
depends  on  what  the  chalk  means  to  you : 
you  may  be  unfamiliar  with  it  and  in  that 
case  you  will  not  notice  it ;  or  you  may  have 
been  born  among  those  thyme-scented  hills 
and  yet  have  no  errant  fancies,  so  that  you 
will  not  think  of  the  hills  that  watched 
you  as  a  child,  but  only  keep  your  mind 
on  the  business  in  hand ;  that  is  probably 
best. 

You  come  after  a  while  to  other  trenches  : 
notice  boards  guide  you,  and  you  keep  to 
Windmill  Avenue.  You  go  by  Pear  Lane, 
Cherry  Lane,  and  Plum  Lane.  Pear  trees, 
cherry  trees  and  plum  trees  must  have 


32  TALES  OF  WAR 

grown  there.  You  are  passing  through 
either  wild  lanes  banked  with  briar,  over 
which  these  various  trees  peered  one  by 
one  and  showered  their  blossoms  down  at 
the  end  of  spring,  and  girls  would  have 
gathered  the  fruit  when  it  ripened,  with 
the  help  of  tall  young  men  ;  or  else  you  are 
passing  through  an  old  walled  garden,  and 
the  pear  and  the  cherry  and  plum  were 
growing  against  the  wall,  looking  south- 
wards all  through  the  summer.  There  is 
no  way  whatever  of  telling  which  it  was ; 
it  is  all  one  in  war ;  whatever  was  there  is 
gone;  there  remain  to-day,  and  survive, 
the  names  of  those  three  trees  only.  We 
come  next  to  Apple  Lane.  You  must  not 
think  that  an  apple  tree  ever  grew  there, 
for  we  trace  here  the  hand  of  the  wit,  who 
by  naming  Plum  Lane's  neighbour  "Apple 
Lane"  merely  commemorates  the  insepa- 
rable connection  that  plum  has  with  apple 
forever  in  the  minds  of  all  who  go  to 
modern  war.  For  by  mixing  apple  with 
plum  the  manufacturer  sees  the  oppor- 


A   WALK  IN  PICARDY          33 

tunity  of  concealing  more  turnip  in  the 
jam,  as  it  were,  at  the  junction  of  the  two 
forces,  than  he  might  be  able  to  do  with- 
out this  unholy  alliance. 

We  come  presently  to  the  dens  of  those 
who  trouble  us  (but  only  for  our  own  good) , 
the  dugouts  of  the  trench  mortar  bat- 
teries. It  is  noisy  when  they  push  up 
close  to  the  front  line  and  play  for  half  an 
hour  or  so  with  their  rivals :  the  enemy 
sends  stuff  back,  our  artillery  join  in ;  it 
is  as  though,  while  you  were  playing  a 
game  of  croquet,  giants  hundreds  of  feet 
high,  some  of  them  friendly,  some  un- 
friendly, carnivorous  and  hungry,  came 
and  played  football  on  your  croquet  lawn. 

We  go  on  past  Battalion  Headquarters, 
and  past  the  dugouts  and  shelters  of 
various  people  having  business  with  His- 
tory, past  stores  of  bombs  and  the  many 
other  ingredients  with  which  history  is 
made,  past  men  coming  down  who  are 
very  hard  to  pass,  for  the  width  of  two  men 
and  two  packs  is  the  width  of  a  communi- 


34  TALES  OF  WAR 

cation  trench  and  sometimes  an  inch  over; 
past  two  men  carrying  a  flying  pig  slung 
on  a  pole  between  them ;  by  many  turn- 
ings ;  and  Windmill  Avenue  brings  you  at 
last  to  Company  Headquarters  in  a  dug- 
out that  Hindenburg  made  with  his  Ger- 
man thoroughness. 

And  there,  after  a  while,  descends  the 
Tok  Emma  man,  the  officer  commanding 
a  trench  mortar  battery,  and  is  given  per- 
chance a  whiskey  and  water,  and  sits  on 
the  best  empty  box  that  we  have  to  offer, 
and  lights  one  of  our  cigarettes. 

"There's  going  to  be  a  bit  of  a  strafe  at 
5.30,"  he  says. 


VI 

WHAT  HAPPENED  ON  THE  NIGHT 
OF  THE    TWENTY-SEVENTH 

THE  night  of  the  twenty-seventh  was 
Dick  Cheeser's  first  night  on  sentry. 
The  night  was  far  gone  when  he  went  on 
duty ;  in  another  hour  they  would  stand  to. 
Dick  Cheeser  had  camouflaged  his  age 
when  he  enlisted :  he  was  barely  eighteen. 
A  wonderfully  short  time  ago  he  was 
quite  a  little  boy ;  now  he  was  in  a  front- 
line trench.  It  hadn't  seemed  that  things 
were  going  to  alter  like  that.  Dick  Cheeser 
was  a  ploughboy :  long  brown  furrows 
over  haughty,  magnificent  downs  seemed 
to  stretch  away  into  the  future  as  far  as 
his  mind  could  see.  No  narrow  outlook 
either,  for  the  life  of  nations  depends  upon 
those  brown  furrows.  But  there  are  the 
bigger  furrows  that  Mars  makes,  the  long 

35 


36  TALES  OF  WAR 

brown  trenches  of  war;  the  life  of  nations 
depends  on  these  too ;  Dick  Cheeser  had 
never  pictured  these.  He  had  heard  talk 
about  a  big  navy  and  a  lot  of  Dread- 
noughts ;  silly  nonsense  he  called  it.  What 
did  one  want  a  big  navy  for  ?  To  keep 
the  Germans  out,  some  people  said.  But 
the  Germans  weren't  coming.  If  they 
wanted  to  come,  why  didn't  they  come? 
Anybody  could  see  that  they  never  did 
come.  Some  of  Dick  Cheeser's  pals  had 
votes. 

And  so  he  had  never  pictured  any  change 
from  ploughing  the  great  downs ;  and  here 
was  war  at  last,  and  here  was  he.  The 
Corporal  showed  him  where  to  stand,  told 
him  to  keep  a  good  lookout  and  left  him. 

And  there  was  Dick  Cheeser  alone  in  the 
dark  with  an  army  in  front  of  him,  eighty 
yards  away:  and,  if  all  tales  were  true, 
a  pretty  horrible  army. 

The  night  was  awfully  still.  I  use  the 
adverb  not  as  Dick  Cheeser  would  have  used 
it.  The  stillness  awed  him.  There  had 


THE  TWENTY-SEVENTH        37 

not  been  a  shell  all  night.  He  put  his  head 
up  over  the  parapet  and  waited.  Nobody 
fired  at  him.  He  felt  that  the  night  was 
waiting  for  him.  He  heard  voices  going 
along  the  trench :  some  one  said  it  was  a 
black  night :  the  voices  died  away.  A 
mere  phrase ;  the  night  wasn't  black  at 
all,  it  was  grey.  Dick  Cheeser  was  star- 
ing at  it,  and  the  night  was  staring  back 
at  him,  and  seemed  to  be  threatening 
him ;  it  was  grey,  grey  as  an  old  cat  that 
they  used  to  have  at  home,  and  as  artful. 
Yes,  thought  Dick  Cheeser,  it  was  an  art- 
ful night ;  that  was  what  was  wrong  with  it. 
If  shells  had  come  or  the  Germans,  or  any- 
thing at  all,  you  would  know  how  to  take 
it ;  but  that  quiet  mist  over  huge  valleys, 
and  stillness !  Anything  might  happen. 
Dick  waited  and  waited,  and  the  night 
waited  too.  He  felt  they  were  watching 
each  other,  the  night  and  he.  He  felt 
that  each  was  crouching.  His  mind  slipped 
back  to  the  woods  on  hills  he  knew.  He 
was  watching  with  eyes  and  ears  and 


38  TALES  OF   WAR 

imagination  to  see  what  would  happen  in 
No  Man's  Land  under  that  ominous  mist : 
but  his  mind  took  a  peep  for  all  that  at 
the  old  woods  that  he  knew.  He  pictured 
himself,  he  and  a  band  of  boys,  chasing 
squirrels  again  in  the  summer.  They  used 
to  chase  a  squirrel  from  tree  to  tree, 
throwing  stones,  till  they  tired  it:  and 
then  they  might  hit  it  with  a  stone  : 
usually  not.  Sometimes  the  squirrel  would 
hide,  and  a  boy  would  have  to  climb  after 
it.  It  was  great  sport,  thought  Dick 
Cheeser.  What  a  pity  he  hadn't  had  a 
catapult  in  those  days,  he  thought.  Some- 
how the  years  when  he  had  not  had  a  cata- 
pult seemed  all  to  be  wasted  years.  With 
a  catapult  one  might  get  the  squirrel  al- 
most at  once,  with  luck :  and  what  a 
great  thing  that  would  be.  All  the  other 
boys  would  come  round  to  look  at  the 
squirrel,  and  to  look  at  the  catapult,  and 
ask  him  how  he  did  it.  He  wouldn't 
have  to  say  much,  there  would  be  the 
squirrel ;  no  boasting  would  be  necessary 


THE  TWENTY-SEVENTH        39 

with  the  squirrel  lying  dead.  It  might 
spread  to  other  things,  even  rabbits ;  al- 
most anything,  in  fact.  He  would  cer- 
tainly get  a  catapult  first  thing  when  he 
got  home.  A  little  wind  blew  in  the  night, 
too  cold  for  summer.  It  blew  away,  as  it 
were,  the  summer  of  Dick's  memories; 
blew  away  hills  and  woods  and  squirrel. 
It  made  for  a  moment  a  lane  in  the  mist 
over  No  Man's  Land.  Dick  Cheeser  peered 
down  it,  but  it  closed  again.  "No,"  Night 
seemed  to  say,  "you  don't  guess  my  secret." 
And  the  awful  hush  intensified.  "What 
would  they  do?"  thought  the  sentry. 
"What  were  they  planning  in  all  those 
miles  of  silence  ?  "  Even  the  Verys  were 
few.  When  one  went  up,  far  hills  seemed 
to  sit  and  brood  over  the  valley :  their 
black  shapes  seemed  to  know  what  would 
happen  in  the  mist  and  seemed  sworn  not 
to  say.  The  rocket  faded,  and  the  hills 
went  back  into  mystery  again,  and  Dick 
Cheeser  peered  level  again  over  the  omi- 
nous valley. 


40  TALES  OF  WAR 

All  the  dangers  and  sinister  shapes  and 
evil  destinies,  lurking  between  the  armies 
in  that  mist,  that  the  sentry  faced  that 
night  cannot  be  told  until  the  history  of 
the  war  is  written  by  a  historian  who  can 
see  the  mind  of  the  soldier.  Not  a  shell 
fell  all  night,  no  German  stirred ;  Dick 
Cheeser  was  relieved  at  "Stand  to"  and 
his  comrades  stood  to  beside  him,  and  soon 
it  was  wide,  golden,  welcome  dawn. 

And  for  all  the  threats  of  night  the  thing 
that  happened  was  one  that  the  lonely 
sentry  had  never  foreseen :  in  the  hour  of 
his  watching  Dick  Cheeser,  though  scarcely 
eighteen,  became  a  full-grown  man. 


VII 

STANDING  TO 

ONE  cannot  say  that  one  time  in  the 
trenches  is  any  more  tense  than 
another.  One  cannot  take  any  one  par- 
ticular hour  and  call  it,  in  modern  non- 
sensical talk,  "typical  hour  in  the  trenches." 
The  routine  of  the  trenches  has  gone  on 
too  long  for  that.  The  tensest  hour  ought 
to  be  half  an  hour  before  dawn,  the  hour 
when  attacks  are  expected  and  men  stand 
to.  It  is  an  old  convention  of  war  that 
that  is  the  dangerous  hour,  the  hour  when 
defenders  are  weakest  and  attack  most  to 
be  feared.  For  darkness  favours  the  at- 
tackers then  as  night  favours  the  lion,  and 
then  dawn  comes  and  they  can  hold  their 
gains  in  the  light.  Therefore  in  every 
trench  in  every  war  the  garrison  is  pre- 
pared in  that  menacing  hour,  watching  in 

41 


42  TALES  OF  WAR 

greater  numbers  than  they  do  the  whole 
night  through.  As  the  first  lark  lifts  from 
meadows  they  stand  there  in  the  dark. 
Whenever  there  is  any  war  in  any  part  of 
the  world  you  may  be  sure  that  at  that 
hour  men  crowd  to  their  parapets :  when 
sleep  is  deepest  in  cities  they  are  watch- 
ing there. 

When  the  dawn  shimmers  a  little,  and 
a  grey  light  comes,  and  widens,  and  all  of 
a  sudden  figures  become  distinct,  and  the 
hour  of  the  attack  that  is  always  expected 
is  gone,  then  perhaps  some  faint  feeling  of 
gladness  stirs  the  newest  of  the  recruits ; 
but  chiefly  the  hour  passes  like  all  the  other 
hours  there,  an  unnoticed  fragment  of  the 
long,  long  routine  that  is  taken  with  resig- 
nation mingled  with  jokes. 

Dawn  comes  shy  with  a  wind  scarce 
felt,  dawn  faint  and  strangely  perceptible, 
feeble  and  faint  in  the  east  while  men  still 
watch  the  darkness.  When  did  the  dark- 
ness go  ?  When  did  the  dawn  grow  golden  ? 
It  happened  as  in  a  moment,  a  moment 


STANDING  TO  43 

you  did  not  see.  Guns  flash  no  longer : 
the  sky  is  gold  and  serene ;  dawn  stands 
there  like  Victory  that  will  shine,  on  one 
of  these  years  when  the  Kaiser  goes  the 
way  of  the  older  curses  of  earth.  Dawn, 
and  the  men  unfix  bayonets  as  they  step 
down  from  the  fire-step  and  clean  their 
rifles  with  pull-throughs.  Not  all  together, 
but  section  by  section,  for  it  would  not  do 
for  a  whole  company  to  be  caught  clean- 
ing their  rifles  at  dawn,  or  at  any  other 
time. 

They  rub  off  the  mud  or  the  rain  that 
has  come  at  night  on  their  rifles,  they  de- 
tach the  magazine  and  see  that  its  spring 
is  working,  they  take  out  the  breechblock 
and  oil  it,  and  put  back  everything  clean : 
and  another  night  is  gone;  it  is  one  day 
nearer  victory. 


A 


VIII 

THE  SPLENDID  TRAVELLER 
TRAVELLER  threw  his  cloak  over 


his  shoulder  and  came  down  slopes 
of  gold  in  El  Dorado.  From  incredible 
heights  he  came.  He  came  from  where 
the  peaks  of  the  pure  gold  mountain  shone 
a  little  red  with  the  sunset ;  from  crag  to 
crag  of  gold  he  stepped  down  slowly. 
Sheer  out  of  romance  he  came  through  the 
golden  evening. 

It  was  only  an  incident  of  every  day; 
the  sun  had  set  or  was  setting,  the  air 
turned  chill,  and  a  battalion's  bugles  were 
playing  "Retreat"  when  this  knightly 
stranger,  a  British  aeroplane,  dipped,  and 
went  homeward  over  the  infantry.  That 
beautiful  evening  call,  and  the  golden 
cloud  bank  towering,  and  that  adventurer 
coming  home  in  the  cold,  happening  all 

44 


THE   SPLENDID  TRAVELLER    45 

together,  revealed  in  a  flash  the  fact  (which 
hours  of  thinking  sometimes  will  not  bring) 
that  we  live  in  such  a  period  of  romance 
as  the  troubadours  would  have  envied. 

He  came,  that  British  airman,  over  the 
border,  sheer  over  No  Man's  Land  and  the 
heads  of  the  enemy  and  the  mysterious 
land  behind,  snatching  the  secrets  that 
the  enemy  would  conceal.  Either  he  had 
defeated  the  German  airmen  who  would 
have  stopped  his  going,  or  they  had  not 
dared  to  try.  Who  knows  what  he  had 
done?  He  had  been  abroad  and  was 
coming  home  in  the  evening,  as  he  did 
every  day. 

Even  when  all  its  romance  has  been 
sifted  from  an  age  (as  the  centuries  sift) 
and  set  apart  from  the  trivial,  and  when 
all  has  been  stored  by  the  poets ;  even 
then  what  has  any  of  them  more  romantic 
than  these  adventurers  in  the  evening  air, 
coming  home  in  the  twilight  with  the 
black  shells  bursting  below  ? 

The  infantry  look  up  with  the  same  vague 


46  TALES  OF  WAR 

wonder  with  which  children  look  at  dragon 
flies;  sometimes  they  do  not  look  at  all, 
for  all  that  comes  in  France  has  its  part 
with  the  wonder  of  a  terrible  story  as  well 
as  with  the  incidents  of  the  day,  incidents 
that  recur  year  in  and  year  out,  too  often 
for  us  to  notice  them.  If  a  part  of  the 
moon  were  to  fall  off  in  the  sky  and  come 
tumbling  to  earth,  the  comment  on  the 
lips  of  the  imperturbable  British  watchers 
that  have  seen  so  much  would  be,  "Hullo, 
what  is  Jerry  up  to  now  ?  " 

And  so  the  British  aeroplane  glides  home 
in  the  evening,  and  the  light  fades  from  the 
air,  and  what  is  left  of  the  poplars  grows 
dark  against  the  sky,  and  what  is  left  of 
the  houses  grows  more  mournful  in  the 
gloaming,  and  night  comes,  and  with  it 
the  sounds  of  thunder,  for  the  airman  has 
given  his  message  to  the  artillery.  It  is 
as  though  Hermes  had  gone  abroad  sail- 
ing upon  his  sandals,  and  had  found  some 
bad  land  below  those  winged  feet  wherein 
men  did  evil  and  kept  not  the  laws  of  gods 


THE   SPLENDID  TRAVELLER    47 

or  men ;    and  he  had  brought  his  message 
back  and  the  gods  were  angry. 

For  the  wars  we  fight  to-day  are  not  like 
other  wars,  and  the  wonders  of  them  are 
unlike  other  wonders.  If  we  do  not  see 
in  them  the  saga  and  epic,  how  shall  we 
tell  of  them  ? 


IX 
ENGLAND 

"  A  ND  then  we  used  to  have  sausages," 
.iV  said  the  Sergeant. 

"And  mashed  ?"    said  the  Private. 

"Yes,"  said  the  Sergeant,  "and  beer. 
And  then  we  used  to  go  home.  It  was 
grand  in  the  evenings.  We  used  to  go 
along  a  lane  that  was  full  of  them  wild 
roses.  And  then  we  come  to  the  road 
where  the  houses  were.  They  all  had 
their  bit  of  a  garden,  every  house." 

"Nice,  I  calls  it,  a  garden,"  the  Private 
said. 

"Yes,"  said  the  Sergeant,  "they  all  had 
their  garden.  It  came  right  down  to  the 
road.  Wooden  palings  :  none  of  that  there 
wire." 

"I  hates  wire,"  said  the  Private. 

"They    didn't    have    none    of    it,"    the 

48 


ENGLAND  49 

N.  C.  O.  went  on.  "The  gardens  came 
right  down  to  the  road,  looking  lovely. 
Old  Billy  Weeks  he  had  them  tall  pale- 
blue  flowers  in  his  garden  nearly  as  high 
as  a  man." 

"Hollyhocks?"  said  the  Private. 

"No,  they  wasn't  hollyhocks.  Lovely 
they  were.  We  used  to  stop  and  look  at 
them,  going  by  every  evening.  He  had  a 
path  up  the  middle  of  his  garden  paved 
with  red  tiles,  Billy  Weeks  had ;  and  these 
tall  blue  flowers  growing  the  whole  way 
along  it,  both  sides  like.  They  was  a 
wonder.  Twenty  gardens  there  must 
have  been,  counting  them  all ;  but  none 
to  touch  Billy  Weeks  with  his  pale-blue 
flowers.  There  was  an  old  windmill  away 
to  the  left.  Then  there  were  the  swifts 
sailing  by  overhead  and  screeching :  just 
about  as  high  again  as  the  houses.  Lord, 
how  them  birds  did  fly.  And  there  was 
the  other  young  fellows,  what  were  not  out 
walking,  standing  about  by  the  roadside, 
just  doing  nothing  at  all.  One  of  them 


50  TALES   OF   WAR 

had  a  flute :  Jim  Booker,  he  was.  Those 
were  great  days.  The  bats  used  to  come 
out,  flutter,  flutter,  flutter;  and  then 
there'd  be  a  star  or  two ;  and  the  smoke 
from  the  chimneys  going  all  grey ;  and  a 
little  cold  wind  going  up  and  down  like  the 
bats  ;  and  all  the  colour  going  out  of  things ; 
and  the  woods  looking  all  strange,  and  a 
wonderful  quiet  in  them,  and  a  mist  com- 
ing up  from  the  stream.  It's  a  queer  time 
that.  It's  always  about  that  time,  the 
way  I  see  it :  the  end  of  the  evening  in 
the  long  days,  and  a  star  or  two,  and  me 
and  my  girl  going  home. 

"Wouldn't  you  like  to  talk  about  things 
for  a  bit  the  way  you  remember  them  ?" 

"Oh,  no,  Sergeant,"  said  the  other, 
"you  go  on.  You  do  bring  it  all  back  so." 

"I  used  to  bring  her  home,"  the  Ser- 
geant said,  "to  her  father's  house.  Her 
father  was  keeper  there,  and  they  had  a 
house  in  the  wood.  A  fine  house  with 
queer  old  tiles  on  it,  and  a  lot  of  large 
friendly  dogs.  I  knew  them  all  by  name, 


ENGLAND  51 

same  as  they  knew  me.  I  used  to  walk 
home  then  along  the  side  of  the  wood.  The 
owls  would  be  about;  you  could  hear 
them  yelling.  They'd  float  out  of  the 
wood  like,  sometimes  :  all  large  and  white." 

"I  knows  them,"  said  the  Private. 

"I  saw  a  fox  once  so  close  I  could  nearly 
touch  him,  walking  like  he  was  on  velvet. 
He  just  slipped  out  of  the  wood." 

"Cunning  old  brute,"  said  the  Private. 

"That's  the  time  to  be  out,"  said  the 
Sergeant.  :'Ten  o'clock  on  a  summer's 
'  night,  and  the  night  full  of  noises,  not 
many  of  them,  but  what  there  is,  strange, 
and  coming  from  a  great  way  off,  through 
the  quiet,  with  nothing  to  stop  them. 
Dogs  barking,  owls  hooting,  an  old  cart ; 
and  then  just  once  a  sound  that  you 
couldn't  account  for  at  all,  not  anyhow. 
I've  heard  sounds  on  nights  like  that  that 
nobody  'ud  think  you'd  heard,  nothing 
like  the  flute  that  young  Booker  had,  noth- 
ing like  anything  on  earth." 

"I  know,"  said  the  Private. 


52  TALES  OF  WAR 

"I  never  told  any  one  before,  because 
they  wouldn't  believe  you.  But  it  doesn't 
matter  now.  There'd  be  a  light  in  the 
window  to  guide  me  when  I  got  home.  I'd 
walk  up  through  the  flowers  of  our  garden. 
We  had  a  lovely  garden.  Wonderful  white 
and  strange  the  flowers  looked  of  a  night- 
time." 

"You  bring  it  all  back  wonderful,"  said 
the  Private. 

"It's  a  great  thing  to  have  lived,"  said 
the  Sergeant. 

"Yes,  Sergeant,"  said  the  other,  "I 
wouldn't  have  missed  it,  not  for  anything," 

For  five  days  the  barrage  had  rained 
down  behind  them :  they  were  utterly  cut 
off  and  had  no  hope  of  rescue :  their  food 
was  done,  and  they  did  not  know  where 
they  were. 


SHELLS 

WHEN  the  aeroplanes  are  home  and 
the  sunset  has  flared  away,  and  it 
is  cold,  and  night  comes  down  over  France, 
you  notice  the  guns  more  than  you  do  by 
day,  or  else  they  are  actually  more  active 
then,  I  do  not  know  which  it  is. 

It  is  then  as  though  a  herd  of  giants, 
things  of  enormous  height,  came  out  from 
lairs  in  the  earth  and  began  to  play  with 
the  hills.  It  is  as  though  they  picked  up 
the  tops  of  the  hills  in  their  hands  and  then 
let  them  drop  rather  slowly.  It  is  exactly 
like  hills  falling.  You  see  the  flashes  all 
along  the  sky,  and  then  that  lumping 
thump  as  though  the  top  of  the  hill  had 
been  let  drop,  not  all  in  one  piece,  but 
crumbled  a  little  as  it  would  drop  from 
your  hands  if  you  were  three  hundred  feet 

53 


54  TALES  OF  WAR 

high  and  were  fooling  about  in  the  night, 
spoiling  what  it  had  taken  so  long  to  make. 
That  is  heavy  stuff  bursting,  a  little  way 
off. 

If  you  are  anywhere  near  a  shell  that 
is  bursting,  you  can  hear  in  it  a  curious 
metallic  ring.  That  applies  to  the  shells  of 
either  side,  provided  that  you  are  near 
enough,  though  usually  of  course  it  is  the 
hostile  shell  and  not  your  own  that  you 
are  nearest  to,  and  so  one  distinguishes 
them.  It  is  curious,  after  such  a  colossal 
event  as  this  explosion  must  be  in  the  life 
of  a  bar  of  steel,  that  anything  should  re- 
main at  all  of  the  old  bell-like  voice  of  the 
metal,  but  it  appears  to,  if  you  listen 
attentively ;  it  is  perhaps  its  last  remon- 
strance before  leaving  its  shape  and  going 
back  to  rust  in  the  earth  again  for  ages. 

Another  of  the  voices  of  the  night  is  the 
whine  the  shell  makes  in  coming ;  it  is  not 
unlike  the  cry  the  hyena  utters  as  soon  as 
it's  dark  in  Africa:  "How  nice  traveller 
would  taste,"  the  hyena  seems  to  say,  and 


SHELLS  55 

"I  want  dead  White  Man."  It  is  the 
rising  note  of  the  shell  as  it  comes  nearer, 
and  its  dying  away  when  it  has  gone  over, 
that  make  it  reminiscent  of  the  hyena's 
method  of  diction.  If  it  is  not  going  over 
then  it  has  something  quite  different  to 
say.  It  begins  the  same  as  the  other,  it 
comes  up,  talking  of  the  back  areas  with 
the  same  long  whine  as  the  other.  I  have 
heard  old  hands  say  "That  one  is  going 
well  over."  "Whee-oo," says  the  shell;  but 
just  where  the  "oo"  should  be  long  drawn 
out  and  turn  into  the  hyena's  final  syllable, 
it  says  something  quite  different.  "Zarp," 
it  says.  That  is  bad.  Those  are  the  shells 
that  are  looking  for  you. 

And  then  of  course  there  is  the  whizz- 
bang  coming  from  close,  along  his  flat 
trajectory :  he  has  little  to  say,  but  comes 
like  a  sudden  wind,  and  all  that  he  has  to 
do  is  done  and  over  at  once. 

And  then  there  is  the  gas  shell,  who  goes 
over  gurgling  gluttonously,  probably  in 
big  herds,  putting  down  a  barrage.  It  is 


56  TALES  OF  WAR 

the  liquid  inside  that  gurgles  before  it  is 
turned  to  gas  by  the  mild  explosion ;  that 
is  the  explanation  of  it ;  yet  that  does  not 
prevent  one  picturing  a  tribe  of  cannibals 
who  have  winded  some  nice  juicy  men  and 
are  smacking  their  chops  and  dribbling  in 
anticipation. 

And  a  wonderful  thing  to  see,  even  in 
those  wonderful  nights,  is  our  thermite 
bursting  over  the  heads  of  the  Germans. 
The  shell  breaks  into  a  shower  of  golden 
rain ;  one  cannot  judge  easily  at  night  how 
high  from  the  ground  it  breaks,  but  about 
as  high  as  the  tops  of  trees  seen  at  a  hun- 
dred yards.  It  spreads  out  evenly  all 
round  and  rains  down  slowly ;  it  is  a  bad 
shower  to  be  out  in,  and  for  a  long  time 
after  it  has  fallen,  the  sodden  grass  of  winter, 
and  the  mud  and  old  bones  beneath  it, 
burn  quietly  in  a  circle.  On  such  a  night 
as  this,  and  in  such  showers,  the  flying  pigs 
will  go  over,  which  take  two  men  to  carry 
each  of  them ;  they  go  over  and  root  right 
down  to  the  German  dugout,  where  the 


SHELLS  57 

German  has  come  in  out  of  the  golden  rain, 
and  they  fling  it  all  up  in  the  air. 

These  are  such  nights  as  Scheherazade 
with  all  her  versatility  never  dreamed  of; 
or  if  such  nightmares  came  she  certainly 
never  told  of  them,  or  her  august  master, 
the  Sultan,  light  of  the  age,  would  have 
had  her  at  once  beheaded ;  and  his  people 
would  have  deemed  that  he  did  well.  It 
has  been  reserved  for  a  modern  autocrat  to 
dream  such  a  nightmare,  driven  to  it  per- 
haps by  the  tales  of  a  white-whiskered 
Scheherazade,  the  Lord  of  the  Kiel  Canal ; 
and  being  an  autocrat  he  has  made  the 
nightmare  a  reality  for  the  world.  But 
the  nightmare  is  stronger  than  its  master, 
and  grows  mightier  every  night;  and  the 
All-Highest  War  Lord  learns  that  there  are 
powers  in  Hell  that  are  easily  summoned 
by  the  rulers  of  earth,  but  that  go  not 
easily  home. 


XI 

TWO  DEGREES  OF  ENVY 

IT  was  night  in  the  front  line  and  no 
moon,  or  the  moon  was  hidden.  There 
was  a  strafe  going  on.  The  Tok  Emmas 
were  angry.  And  the  artillery  on  both 
sides  were  looking  for  the  Tok  Emmas. 

Tok  Emma,  I  may  explain  for  the  blessed 
dwellers  in  whatever  far  happy  island  there 
be  that  has  not  heard  of  these  things,  is  the 
crude  language  of  Mars.  He  has  not  time 
to  speak  of  a  trunk  mortar  battery,  for 
he  is  always  in  a  hurry,  and  so  he  calls  them 
T.  M.'s.  But  Bellona  might  not  hear  him 
saying  T.  M.,  for  all  the  din  that  she  makes  : 
might  think  that  he  said  D.  N;  and  so  he 
calls  it  Tok  Emma.  Ak,  Beer,  C,  Don : 
this  is  the  alphabet  of  Mars. 

And  the  huge  minnies  were  throwing  old 
limbs  out  of  No  Man's  Land  into  the  front- 

58 


TWO  DEGREES  OF  ENVY      59 

line  trench,  and  shells  were  rasping  down 
through  the  air  that  seemed  to  resist  them 
until  it  was  torn  to  pieces :  they  burst  and 
showers  of  mud  came  down  from  heaven. 
Aimlessly,  as  it  seemed,  shells  were  burst- 
ing now  and  then  in  the  air,  with  a  flash 
intensely  red  :  the  smell  of  them  was  drift- 
ing down  the  trenches. 

In  the  middle  of  all  this  Bert  Butter- 
worth  was  hit.  "Only  in  the  foot,"  his 
pals  said.  "Only  !"  said  Bert.  They  put 
him  on  a  stretcher  and  carried  him  down 
the  trench.  They  passed  Bill  Britterling, 
standing  in  the  mud,  an  old  friend  of  Bert's. 
Bert's  face,  twisted  with  pain,  looked  up  to 
Bill  for  some  sympathy. 

"Lucty  devil,"  said  Bill. 

Across  the  way  on  the  other  side  of  No 
Man's  Land  there  was  mud  the  same  as 
on  Bill's  side :  only  the  mud  over  there 
stank ;  it  didn't  seem  to  have  been  kept 
clean  somehow.  And  the  parapet  was 
sliding  away  in  places,  for  working  parties 
had  not  had  much  of  a  chance.  They  had 


60  TALES  OF  WAR 

three  Tok  Emmas  working  in  that  bat- 
talion front  line,  and  the  British  batteries 
did  not  quite  know  where  they  were,  and 
there  were  eight  of  them  looking. 

Fritz  Groedenschasser,  standing  in  that 
unseemly  mud,  greatly  yearned  for  them 
to  find  soon  what  they  were  looking  for. 
Eight  batteries  searching  for  something 
they  can't  find,  along  a  trench  in  which 
you  have  to  be,  leaves  the  elephant  hunter's 
most  desperate  tale  a  little  dull  and  in- 
sipid. Not  that  Fritz  Groedenschasser 
knew  anything  about  elephant  hunting : 
he  hated  all  things  sporting,  and  cordially 
approved  of  the  execution  of  Nurse  Cavell. 
And  there  was  thermite  too.  Flammen- 
werfer  was  all  very  well,  a  good  German 
weapon :  it  could  burn  a  man  alive  at 
twenty  yards.  But  this  accursed  flaming 
English  thermite  could  catch  you  at  four 
miles.  It  wasn't  fair. 

The  three  German  trench  mortars  were 
all  still  firing.  When  would  the  English 
batteries  find  what  they  were  looking  for, 


TWO  DEGREES  OF  ENVY      61 

and  this  awful  thing  stop  ?  The  night  was 
cold  and  smelly. 

Fritz  shifted  his  feet  in  the  foul  mud,  but 
no  warmth  came  to  him  that  way. 

A  gust  of  shells  was  coming  along  the 
trench.  Still  they  had  not  found  the  min- 
newerfer !  Fritz  moved  from  his  place 
altogether  to  see  if  he  could  find  some 
place  where  the  parapet  was  not  broken. 
And  as  he  moved  along  the  sewerlike  trench 
he  came  on  a  wooden  cross  that  marked  the 
grave  of  a  man  he  once  had  known,  now 
buried  some  days  in  the  parapet,  old  Ritz 
Handelscheiner. 

"Lucky  devil,"  said  Fritz. 


XII 

THE  MASTER  OF  NO  MAN'S  LAND 

WHEN  the  last  dynasty  has  fallen  and 
the  last  empire  passed  away,  when 
man  himself  has  gone,  there  will  probably 
still  remain  the  swede.1 

There  grew  a  swede  in  No  Man's  Land 
by  Croisille  near  the  Somme,  and  it  had 
grown  there  for  a  long  while  free  from  man. 

It  grew  as  you  never  saw  a  swede  grow 
before.  It  grew  tall  and  strong  and  weedy. 
It  lifted  its  green  head  and  gazed  round 
over  No  Man's  Land.  Yes,  man  was  gone, 
and  it  was  the  day  of  the  swede. 

The  storms  were  tremendous.  Some- 
times pieces  of  iron  sang  through  its  leaves. 
But  man  was  gone  and  it  was  the  day  of  the 
swede. 

A  man  used  to  come  there  once,  a  great 
French  farmer,  an  oppressor  of  swedes. 

1  The  rutabaga  or  Swedish  turnip. 
62 


MASTER  OF  NO  MAN'S  LAND    63 

Legends  were  told  of  him  and  his  herd  of 
cattle,  dark  traditions  that  passed  down 
vegetable  generations.  It  was  somehow 
known  in  those  fields  that  the  man  ate 
swedes. 

And  now  his  house  was  gone  and  he 
would  come  no  more. 

The  storms  were  terrible,  but  they  were 
better  than  man.  The  swede  nodded  to 
his  companions  :  the  years  of  freedom  had 
come. 

They  had  always  known  among  them 
that  these  years  would  come.  Man  had 
not  been  there  always,  but  there  had  al- 
ways been  swedes.  He  would  go  some  day, 
suddenly,  as  he  came.  That  was  the  faith 
of  the  swedes.  And  when  the  trees  went 
the  swede  believed  that  the  day  was  come. 
When  hundreds  of  little  weeds  arrived  that 
were  never  allowed  before,  and  grew  un- 
checked, he  knew  it. 

After  that  he  grew  without  any  care,  in 
sunlight,  moonlight  and  rain ;  grew  abun- 
dantly and  luxuriantly  in  the  freedom,  and 


64  TALES  OF  WAR 

increased  in  arrogance  till  he  felt  himself 
greater  than  man.  And  indeed  in  those 
leaden  storms  that  sang  often  over  his 
foliage  all  living  things  seemed  equal. 

There  was  little  that  the  Germans  left 
when  they  retreated  from  the  Somme  that 
was  higher  than  this  swede.  He  grew  the 
tallest  thing  for  miles  and  miles.  He  domi- 
nated the  waste.  Two  cats  slunk  by  him 
from  a  shattered  farm :  he  towered  above 
them  contemptuously. 

A  partridge  ran  by  him  once,  far,  far 
below  his  lofty  leaves.  The  night  winds 
mourning  in  No  Man's  Land  seemed  to 
sing  for  him  alone. 

It  was  surely  the  hour  of  the  swede. 
For  him,  it  seemed,  was  No  Man's  Land. 
And  there  I  met  him  one  night  by  the  light 
of  a  German  rocket  and  brought  him  back 
to  our  company  to  cook. 


XIII 
WEEDS  AND  WIRE 

THINGS  had  been  happening.  Divi- 
sions were  moving.  There  had  been, 
there  was  going  to  be,  a  stunt.  A  bat- 
talion marched  over  the  hill  and  sat  down 
by  the  road.  They  had  left  the  trenches 
three  days'  march  to  the  north  and  had 
come  to  a  new  country.  The  officers  pulled 
their  maps  out ;  a  mild  breeze  fluttered 
them ;  yesterday  had  been  winter  and  to- 
day was  spring ;  but  spring  in  a  desolation 
so  complete  and  far-reaching  that  you  only 
knew  of  it  by  that  little  wind.  It  was  early 
March  by  the  calendar,  but  the  wind  was 
blowing  out  of  the  gates  of  April.  A 
platoon  commander,  feeling  that  mild  wind 
blowing,  forgot  his  map  and  began  to 
whistle  a  tune  that  suddenly  came  to  him 
out  of  the  past  with  the  wind.  Out  of  the 

65 


66  TALES   OF   WAR 

past  it  blew  and  out  of  the  South,  a  merry 
vernal  tune  of  a  Southern  people.  Per- 
haps only  one  of  those  that  noticed  the 
tune  had  ever  heard  it  before.  An  officer 
sitting  near  had  heard  it  sung ;  it  reminded 
him  of  a  holiday  long  ago  in  the  South. 

"Where  did  you  hear  that  tune?"  he 
asked  the  platoon  commander. 

"Oh,  the  hell  of  a  long  way  from  here,'* 
the  platoon  commander  said. 

He  did  not  remember  quite  where  it  was 
he  had  heard  it,  but  he  remembered  a 
sunny  day  in  France  and  a  hill  all  dark  with 
pine  woods,  and  a  man  coming  down  at 
evening  out  of  the  woods,  and  down  the 
slope  to  the  village,  singing  this  song.  Be- 
tween the  village  and  the  slope  there  were 
orchards  in  blossom.  So  that  he  came 
with  his  song  for  hundreds  of  yards  through 
orchards.  "The  hell  of  a  way  from  here," 
he  said. 

For  a  long  while  then  they  sat  silent. 

"It  mightn't  have  been  so  very  far  from 
here,"  said  the  platoon  commander.  "It 


WEEDS  AND  WIRE  67 

was  in  France,  now  I  come  to  think  of  it. 
But  it  was  a  lovely  part  of  France,  all 
woods  and  orchards.  Nothing  like  this, 
thank  God."  And  he  glanced  with  a  tired 
look  at  the  unutterable  desolation. 

"Where  was  it?"  said  the  other. 

"In  Picardy,"  he  said. 

"Aren't  we  in  Picardy  now?"  said  his 
friend. 

"Are  we?"  he  said. 

"I  don't  know.  The  maps  don't  call  it 
Picardy." 

"It  was  a  fine  place,  anyway,"  the  platoon 
commander  said.  :c  There  seemed  always 
to  be  a  wonderful  light  on  the  hills.  A 
kind  of  short  grass  grew  on  them,  and 
it  shone  in  the  sun  at  evening.  There 
were  black  woods  above  them.  A  man 
used  to  come  out  of  them  singing  at  even- 
ing." 

He  looked  wearily  round  at  the  brown 
desolation  of  weeds.  As  far  as  the  two 
officers  could  see  there  was  nothing  but 
brown  weeds  and  bits  of  brown  barbed 


68  TALES  OF  WAR 

wire.  He  turned  from  the  desolate  scene 
back  to  his  reminiscences. 

"He  came  singing  through  the  orchards 
into  the  village,"  he  said.  "A  quaint  old 
place  with  queer  gables,  called  Ville-en- 
Bois." 

"Do  you  know  where  we  are?"  said  the 
other. 

"No,"  said  the  platoon  commander. 

"I  thought  not,"  he  said.  "Hadn't  you 
better  take  a  look  at  the  map  ?" 

"I  suppose  so,"  said  the  platoon  com- 
mander, and  he  smoothed  out  his  map  and 
wearily  got  to  the  business  of  finding  out 
where  he  was. 

"Good  Lord!"  he  said.  "Ville-en- 
Bois!" 


XIV 

SPRING  IN  ENGLAND  AND 
FLANDERS 

VERY  soon  the  earliest  primroses  will  be 
coming  out  in  woods  wherever  they 
have  been  sheltered  from  the  north.  They 
will  grow  bolder  as  the  days  go  by,  and 
spread  and  come  all  down  the  slopes  of  sunny 
hills.  Then  the  anemones  will  come,  like  a 
shy  pale  people,  one  of  the  tribes  of  the  elves, 
who  dare  not  leave  the  innermost  deeps  of 
the  wood :  in  those  days  all  the  trees  will  be 
in  leaf,  the  bluebells  will  follow,  and  certain 
fortunate  woods  will  shelter  such  myriads 
of  them  that  the  bright  fresh  green  of  the 
beech  trees  will  flash  between  two  blues,  the 
blue  of  the  sky  and  the  deeper  blue  of  the 
bluebells.  Later  the  violets  come,  and  such 
a  time  as  this  is  the  perfect  time  to  see 
England  :  when  the  cuckoo  is  heard  and  he 

69 


70  TALES  OF  WAR 

surprises  his  hearers;  when  evenings  are 
lengthening  out  and  the  bat  is  abroad  again ; 
and  all  the  flowers  are  out  and  all  the  birds 
sing.  At  such  a  time  not  only  Nature 
smiles  but  our  quiet  villages  and  grave  old 
spires  wake  up  from  winter  in  the  mellow 
air  and  wear  their  centuries  lightly.  At 
such  a  time  you  might  come  just  at  evening 
on  one  of  those  old  villages  in  a  valley  and 
find  it  in  the  mood  to  tell  you  the  secret  of 
the  ages  that  it  hid  and  treasured  there 
before  the  Normans  came.  Who  knows? 
For  they  are  very  old,  very  wise,  very 
friendly ;  they  might  speak  to  you  one  warm 
evening.  If  you  went  to  them  after  great 
suffering  they  might  speak  to  you ;  after 
nights  and  nights  of  shelling  over  in  France, 
they  might  speak  to  you  and  you  might 
hear  them  clearly. 

It  would  be  a  long,  long  story  that  they 
would  tell,  all  about  the  ages ;  and  it  would 
vary  wonderfully  little,  much  less  perhaps 
than  we  think ;  and  the  repetitions  rambling 
on  and  on  in  the  evening,  as  the  old  belfry 


SPRING   IN  ENGLAND          71 

spoke  and  the  cottages  gathered  below  it, 
might  sound  so  soothing  after  the  boom  of 
shells  that  perhaps  you  would  nearly  sleep. 
And  then  with  one's  memory  tired  out  by 
the  war  one  might  never  remember  the  long 
story  they  told,  when  the  belfry  and  the 
brown-roofed  houses  all  murmured  at  even- 
ing, might  never  remember  even  that  they 
had  spoken  all  through  that  warm  spring 
and  evening.  We  may  have  heard  them 
speak  and  forgotten  that  they  have  spoken. 
Who  knows?  We  are  at  war,  and  see  so 
many  strange  things  :  some  we  must  forget, 
some  we  must  remember ;  and  we  cannot 
choose  which. 

To  turn  from  Kent  to  Flanders  is  to  turn 
to  a  time  of  mourning  through  all  seasons 
alike.  Spring  there  brings  out  no  leaf  on 
myriad  oaks,  nor  the  haze  of  green  that 
floats  like  a  halo  above  the  heads  of  the 
birch  trees,  that  stand  with  their  fairy  like 
trunks  haunting  the  deeps  of  the  woods. 
For  miles  and  miles  and  miles  summer 
ripens  no  crops,  leads  out  no  maidens 


72  TALES  OF  WAR 

laughing  in  the  moonlight,  and  brings  no 
harvest  home.  When  Autumn  looks  on 
orchards  in  all  that  region  of  mourning  he 
looks  upon  barren  trees  that  will  never 
blossom  again.  Whiter  drives  in  no  sturdy 
farmers  at  evening  to  sit  before  cheery 
fires,  families  meet  not  at  Christmas,  and 
the  bells  are  dumb  in  belfries ;  for  all  by 
which  a  man  might  remember  his  home  has 
been  utterly  swept  away :  has  been  swept 
away  to  make  a  maniacal  dancing  ground 
on  which  a  murderous  people  dance  to  their 
death  led  by  a  shallow,  clever,  callous,  im- 
perial clown. 

There  they  dance  to.  their  doom  till  their 
feet  shall  find  the  precipice  that  was  pre- 
pared for  them  on  the  day  that  they 
planned  the  evil  things  they  have  done. 


T 


XV 

THE  NIGHTMARE  COUNTRIES 
HERE  are  certain  lands  in  the  darker 


dreams  of  poetry  that  stand  out  in  the 
memory  of  generations.  There  is  for  in- 
stance Poe's  "Dark  tarn  of  Auber,  the 
ghoul-haunted  region  of  Weir";  there  are 
some  queer  twists  in  the  river  Alph  as 
imagined  by  Coleridge ;  two  lines  of  Swin- 
burne : 

"By  the  tideless  dolorous  inland  sea 

In  a  land  of  sand  and  ruin  and  gold," 
are  as  haunting  as  any.  There  are  in 
literature  certain  regions  of  gloom,  so 
splendid  that  whenever  you  come  on  them 
they  leave  in  the  mind  a  sort  of  nightmare 
country  which  one's  thoughts  revisit  on 
hearing  the  lines  quoted. 

It  is  pleasant  to  picture  such  countries 
sometimes  when  sitting  before  the  fire.     It 

73 


74  TALES   OF   WAR 

is  pleasant  because  you  can  banish  them  by 
the  closing  of  a  book ;  a  puff  of  smoke  from 
a  pipe  will  hide  them  altogether,  and  back 
come  the  pleasant,  wholesome,  familiar 
things.  But  in  France  they  are  there 
always.  In  France  the  nightmare  countries 
stand  all  night  in  the  starlight ;  dawn  comes 
and  they  still  are  there.  The  dead  are 
buried  out  of  sight  and  others  take  their 
places  among  men ;  but  the  lost  lands  lie 
unburied  gazing  up  at  the  winds ;  and  the 
lost  woods  stand  like  skeletons  all  grotesque 
in  the  solitude ;  the  very  seasons  have  fled 
from  them.  The  very  seasons  have  fled ; 
so  that  if  you  look  up  to  see  whether  sum- 
mer has  turned  to  autumn,  or  if  autumn  has 
turned  to  winter  yet,  nothing  remains  to 
show  you.  It  is  like  the  eccentric  dream 
of  some  strange  man,  very  arresting  and 
mysterious,  but  lacking  certain  things  that 
should  be  there  before  you  can  recognize 
it  as  earthly.  It  is  a  mad,  mad  landscape. 
There  are  miles  and  miles  and  miles  of  it. 
It  is  the  biggest  thing  man  has  done.  It 


THE  NIGHTMARE  COUNTRIES    75 

looks  as  though  man  in  his  pride,  with  all 
his  clever  inventions,  had  made  for  himself 
a  sorry  attempt  at  creation. 

Indeed  when  we  trace  it  all  back  to  its 
origin  we  find  at  the  beginning  of  this 
unhappy  story  a  man  who  was  only  an 
emperor  and  wished  to  be  something  more. 
He  would  have  ruled  the  world  but  has  only 
meddled  with  it ;  and  his  folly  has  brought 
misery  to  millions,  and  there  lies  his  broken 
dream  on  the  broken  earth.  He  will  never 
take  Paris  now.  He  will  never  be  crowned 
at  Versailles  as  Emperor  of  Europe ;  and 
after  that,  most  secret  dream  of  all,  did 
not  the  Caesars  proclaim  themselves  divine  ? 
Was  it  not  whispered  among  Macedonian 
courtiers  that  Alexander  was  the  child  of 
God  ?  And  was  the  Hohenzollern  less  than 
these  ? 

What  might  not  force  accomplish  ?  All 
gone  now,  that  dream  and  the  Hohen- 
zollern line  broken.  A  maniacal  dream 
and  broken  farms  all  mixed  up  together : 
they  make  a  pretty  nightmare  and  the 


76  TALES  OF  WAR 

clouds  still  gleam  at  night  with  the  flashes 
of  shells,  and  the  sky  is  still  troubled  by 
day  with  uncouth  balloons  and  the  black 
bursts  of  the  German  shells  and  the  white 
of  our  anti-aircraft. 

And  below  there  lies  this  wonderful  waste 
land  where  no  girls  sing,  and  where  no  birds 
come  but  starlings ;  where  no  hedgerows 
stand,  and  no  lanes  with  wild  roses,  and 
where  no  pathways  run  through  fields  of 
wheat,  and  there  are  no  fields  at  all  and  no 
farms  and  no  farmers ;  and  two  haystacks 
stand  on  a  hill  I  know,  undestroyed  in  the 
desolation,  and  nobody  touches  them  for 
they  know  the  Germans  too  well ;  and  the 
tops  have  been  blown  off  hills  down  to  the 
chalk.  And  men  say  of  this  place  that  it  is 
Pozieres  and  of  that  place  that  it  is  Ginchy ; 
nothing  remains  to  show  that  hamlets  stood 
there  at  all,  and  a  brown,  brown  weed  grows 
over  it  all  for  ever ;  and  a  mighty  spirit  has 
arisen  in  man,  and  no  one  bows  to  the  War 
Lord  though  many  die.  And  Liberty  is 
she  who  sang  her  songs  of  old,  and  is  fair 


THE  NIGHTMARE  COUNTRIES    77 

as  she  ever  was,  when  men  see  her  in  visions, 
at  night  in  No  Man's  Land  when  they  have 
the  strength  to  crawl  in :  still  she  walks  of 
a  night  in  Pozieres  and  in  Ginchy. 

A  fanciful  man  once  called  himself  the 
Emperor  of  the  Sahara :  the  German  Kaiser 
has  stolen  into  a  fair  land  and  holds  with 
weakening  hands  a  land  of  craters  and 
weed,  and  wire  and  wild  cabbages  and  old 
German  bones. 


XVI 
SPRING  AND  THE  KAISER 

WHILE  all  the  world  is  waiting  for 
Spring  there  lie  great  spaces  in  one 
of  the  pleasantest  lands  to    which  Spring 
cannot  come. 

Pear  trees  and  cherry  and  orchards  flash 
over  other  lands,  blossoming  as  abundantly 
as  though  their  wonder  were  new,  with  a 
beauty  as  fresh  and  surprising  as  though 
nothing  like  it  before  had  ever  adorned 
countless  centuries.  Now  with  the  larch 
and  soon  with  the  beech  trees  and  hazel,  a 
bright  green  blazes  forth  to  illumine  the 
year.  The  slopes  are  covered  with  violets. 
Those  who  have  gardens  are  beginning  to 
be  proud  of  them  and  to  point  them  out 
to  their  neighbours.  Almond  and  peach  in 
blossom  peep  over  old  brick  walls.  The 

78 


SPRING  AND  THE   KAISER      79 

land  dreams  of  summer  all  in  the  youth  of 
the  year. 

But  better  than  all  this  the  Germans 
have  found  war.  The  simple  content  of 
a  people  at  peace  in  pleasant  countries 
counted  for  nothing  with  them.  Their 
Kaiser  prepared  for  war,  made  speeches 
about  war,  and,  when  he  was  ready,  made 
war.  And  now  the  hills  that  should  be 
covered  with  violets  are  full  of  murderous 
holes,  and  the  holes  are  half  full  of  empty 
meat  tins,  and  the  garden  walls  have  gone 
and  the  gardens  with  them,  and  there  are  no 
woods  left  to  shelter  anemones.  Boundless 
masses  of  brown  barbed  wire  straggle  over 
the  landscape.  All  the  orchards  there  are 
cut  down  out  of  ruthless  spite  to  hurt  France 
whom  they  cannot  conquer.  All  the  little 
trees  that  grow  near  gardens  are  gone, 
aspen,  laburnum  and  lilac.  It  is  like  this 
for  hundreds  of  miles.  Hundreds  of  ruined 
towns  gaze  at  it  with  vacant  windows  and 
see  a  land  from  which  even  Spring  is  ban- 
ished. And  not  a  ruined  house  in  all  the 


80  TALES  OF  WAR 

hundred  towns  but  mourns  for  some  one, 
man,  woman  or  child ;  for  the  Germans 
make  war  equally  on  all  in  the  land  where 
Spring  comes  no  more. 

Some  day  Spring  will  come  back ;  some 
day  she  will  shine  all  April  in  Picardy  again, 
for  Nature  is  never  driven  utterly  forth, 
but  comes  back  with  her  seasons  to  cover 
up  even  the  vilest  things. 

She  shall  hide  the  raw  earth  of  the  shell 
holes  till  the  violets  come  again ;  she  shall 
bring  back  even  the  orchards  for  Spring 
to  walk  in  once  more ;  the  woods  will  grow 
tall  again  above  the  southern  anemones ; 
and  the  great  abandoned  guns  of  the  Ger- 
mans will  rust  by  the  rivers  of  France. 
Forgotten  like  them,  the  memory  of  the 
War  Lord  will  pass  with  his  evil  deeds. 


XVII 
TWO  SONGS 

OVER  slopes  of  English  hills  looking 
south  in  the  time  of  violets,  evening 
was  falling. 

Shadows  at  edges  of  woods  moved,  and 
then  merged  in  the  gloaming. 

The  bat,  like  a  shadow  himself,  finding 
that  spring  was  come,  slipped  from  the  dark 
of  the  wood  as  far  as  a  clump  of  beech 
trees  and  fluttered  back  again  on  his 
wonderful  quiet  wings. 

Pairing  pigeons  were  home. 

Very  young  rabbits  stole  out  to  gaze  at 
the  calm  still  world.  They  came  out  as  the 
stars  come.  At  one  time  they  were  not 

i 

there,  and  then  you  saw  them,  but  you  did 
not  see  them  come. 

Towering  clouds  to  the  west  built  palaces, 
cities  and  mountains ;  bastions  of  rose  and 

81 


82  TALES  OF  WAR 

precipices  of  gold ;  giants  went  home  over 
them  draped  in  mauve  by  steep  rose-pink 
ravines  into  emerald-green  empires.  Tur- 
bulences of  colour  broke  out  above  the  de- 
parted sun ;  giants  merged  into  mountains, 
and  cities  became  seas,  and  new  processions 
of  other  fantastic  things  sailed  by.  But 
the  chalk  slopes  facing  south  smiled  on  with 
the  same  calm  light,  as  though  every  blade 
of  grass  gathered  a  ray  from  the  gloaming. 
All  the  hills  faced  the  evening  with  that 
same  quiet  glow,  which  faded  softly  as  the 
air  grew  colder ;  and  the  first  star  appeared. 

Voices  came  up  in  the  hush,  clear  from 
the  valley,  and  ceased.  A  light  was  lit, 
like  a  spark,  in  a  distant  window :  more 
stars  appeared  and  the  woods  were  all  dark 
now,  and  shapes  even  on  the  hill  slopes 
began  to  grow  indistinct. 

Home  by  a  laneway  in  the  dim,  still  even- 
ing a  girl  was  going,  singing  the  Marseillaise. 

In  France  where  the  downs  in  the  north 
roll  away  without  hedges,  as  though  they 
were  great  free  giants  that  man  had  never 


TWO   SONGS  83 

confined,  as  though  they  were  stretching 
their  vast  free  limbs  in  the  evening,  the 
same  light  was  smiling  and  glimmering 
softly  away. 

A  road  wound  over  the  downs  and  away 
round  one  of  their  shoulders.  A  hush  lay 
over  them  as  though  the  giants  slept,  or  as 
though  they  guarded  in  silence  their  ancient, 
wonderful  history. 

The  stillness  deepened  and  the  dimness  of 
twilight ;  and  just  before  colours  fade,  while 
shapes  can  still  be  distinguished,  there  came 
by  the  road  a  farmer  leading  his  Norman 
horse.  High  over  the  horse's  withers  his 
collar  pointed  with  brass  made  him  fantastic 
and  huge  and  strange  to  see  in  the  evening. 

They  moved  together  through  that  mel- 
low light  towards  where  unseen  among  the 
clustered  downs  the  old  French  farmer's 
house  was  sheltered  away. 

He  was  going  home  at  evening  humming 
"God  Save  the  King." 


XVIII 

THE  PUNISHMENT 

AN  exhalation  arose,  drawn  up  by  the 
moon,  from  an  old  battlefield  after 
the  passing  of  years.  It  came  out  of  very 
old  craters  and  gathered  from  trenches, 
smoked  up  from  No  Man's  Land,  and  the 
ruins  of  farms ;  it  rose  from  the  rottenness 
of  dead  brigades,  and  lay  for  half  the  night 
over  two  armies ;  but  at  midnight  the  moon 
drew  it  up  all  into  one  phantom  and  it  rose 
and  trailed  away  eastwards. 

It  passed  over  men  in  grey  that  were 
weary  of  war;  it  passed  over  a  land  once 
prosperous,  happy  and  mighty,  in  which 
were  a  people  that  were  gradually  starving ; 
it  passed  by  ancient  belfries  in  which  there 
were  no  bells  now ;  it  passed  over  fear  and 
misery  and  weeping,  and  so  came  to  the 
palace  at  Potsdam.  It  was  the  dead  of  the 

84 


THE  PUNISHMENT  85 

night  between  midnight  and  dawn,  and  the 
palace  was  very  still  that  the  Emperor 
might  sleep,  and  sentries  guarded  it  who 
made  no  noise  and  relieved  others  in  silence. 
Yet  it  was  not  so  easy  to  sleep.  Picture  to 
yourself  a  murderer  who  had  killed  a  man. 
Would  you  sleep  ?  Picture  yourself  the 
man  that  planned  this  war !  Yes,  you 
sleep,  but  nightmares  come. 

The  phantom  entered  the  chamber. 
"Come,"  it  said. 

The  Kaiser  leaped  up  at  once  as  obe- 
diently as  when  he  came  to  attention  on 
parade,  years  ago,  as  a  subaltern  in  the 
Prussian  Guard,  a  man  whom  no  woman  or 
child  as  yet  had  ever  cursed ;  he  leaped  up 
and  followed.  They  passed  the  silent  sen- 
tries ;  none  challenged  and  none  saluted ; 
they  were  moving  swiftly  over  the  town  as 
the  felon  Gothas  go  ;  they  came  to  a  cottage 
in  the  country.  They  drifted  over  a  little 
garden  gate,  and  there  in  a  neat  little 
garden  the  phantom  halted  like  a  wind  that 
has  suddenly  ceased.  "Look,"  it  said. 


86  TALES   OF  WAR 

Should  he  look  ?  Yet  he  must  look.  The 
Kaiser  looked ;  and  saw  a  window  shining 
and  a  neat  room  in  the  cottage :  there  was 
nothing  dreadful  there ;  thank  the  good 
German  God  for  that ;  it  was  all  right,  after 
all.  The  Kaiser  had  had  a  fright,  but  it 
was  all  right ;  there  was  only  a  woman  with 
a  baby  sitting  before  the  fire,  and  two 
small  children  and  a  man.  And  it  was 
quite  a  jolly  room.  And  the  man  was  a 
young  soldier ;  and,  why,  he  was  a  Prussian 
Guardsman,  —  there  was  his  helmet  hang- 
ing on  the  wall,  —  so  everything  was  all 
right.  They  were  jolly  German  children ; 
that  was  well.  How  nice  and  homely  the 
room  was.  There  shone  before  him,  and 
showed  far  off  in  the  night,  the  visible 
reward  of  German  thrift  and  industry.  It 
was  all  so  tidy  and  neat,  and  yet  they  were 
quite  poor  people.  The  man  had  done  his 
work  for  the  Fatherland,  and  yet  beyond 
all  that  had  been  able  to  afford  all  those 
little  knickknacks  that  make  a  home  so 
pleasant  and  that  in  their  humble  little 


THE   PUNISHMENT  87 

way  were  luxury.  And  while  the  Kaiser 
looked  the  two  young  children  laughed  as 
they  played  on  the  floor,  not  seeing  that 
face  at  the  window. 

Why !  Look  at  the  helmet.  That  was 
lucky.  A  bullet  hole  right  through  the 
front  of  it.  That  must  have  gone  very 
close  to  the  man's  head.  How  ever  did  it 
get  through?  It  must  have  glanced  up- 
wards as  bullets  sometimes  do.  The  hole 
was  quite  low  in  the  helmet.  It  would  be 
dreadful  to  have  bullets  coming  by  close 
like  that.  The  firelight  flickered,  and  the 
lamp  shone  on,  and  the  children  played  on 
the  floor,  and  the  man  was  smoking  out  of 
a  china  pipe ;  he  was  strong  and  able  and 
young,  one  of  the  wealth-winners  of  Ger- 
many. 

"Have  you  seen?"  said  the  phantom. 

"Yes,"  said  the  Kaiser.  It  was  well,  he 
thought,  that  a  Kaiser  should  see  how  his 
people  lived. 

At  once  the  fire  went  out  and  the  lamp 
faded  away,  the  room  fell  sombrely  into 


88  TALES  OF  WAR 

neglect  and  squalor,  and  the  soldier  and  the 
children  faded  away  with  the  room ;  all 
disappeared  phantasmally,  and  nothing  re- 
mained but  the  helmet  in  a  kind  of  glow  on 
the  wall,  and  the  woman  sitting  all  by  her- 
self in  the  darkness. 

"It  has  all  gone,"  said  the  Kaiser. 

"It  has  never  been,"  said  the  phantom. 

The  Kaiser  looked  again.  Yes,  there 
was  nothing  there,  it  was  just  a  vision. 
There  were  the  grey  walls  all  damp  and 
uncared  for,  and  that  helmet  standing  out 
solid  and  round,  like  the  only  real  thing 
among  fancies.  No,  it  had  never  been.  It 
was  just  a  vision. 

"It  might  have  been,"  said  the  phantom. 

Might  have  been?  How  might  it  have 
been? 

"Come,"  said  the  phantom. 

They  drifted  away  down  a  little  lane  that 
in  summer  would  have  had  roses,  and  came 
to  an  Uhlan's  house ;  in  times  of  peace  a 
small  farmer.  Farm  buildings  in  good 
repair  showed  even  in  the  night,  and  the 


THE   PUNISHMENT  89 

black  shapes  of  haystacks ;  again  a  well- 
kept  garden  lay  by  the  house.  The  phan- 
tom and  the  Kaiser  stood  in  the  garden ; 
before  them  a  window  glowed  in  a  lamplit 
room. 

"Look,"  said  the  phantom. 

The  Kaiser  looked  again  and  saw  a 
young  couple ;  the  woman  played  with  a 
baby,  and  all  was  prosperous  in  the  merry 
room.  Again  the  hard- won  wealth  of  Ger- 
many shone  out  for  all  to  see,  the  cosy 
comfortable  furniture  spoke  of  acres  well 
cared  for,  spoke  of  victory  in  the  struggle 
with  the  seasons  on  which  wealth  of  nations 
depends. 

"It  might  have  been,"  said  the  phantom. 

Again  the  fire  died  out  and  the  merry 
scene  faded  away,  leaving  a  melancholy, 
ill-kept  room,  with  poverty  and  mourning 
haunting  dusty  corners  and  the  woman  sit- 
ting alone. 

"Why  do  you  show  me  this?"  said  the 
Kaiser.  "Why  do  you  show  me  these 
visions?" 


90  TALES  OF  WAR 

"Come,"  said  the  phantom. 

"What  is  it ? "  said  the  Kaiser.  " Where 
are  you  bringing  me  ?  " 

"Come,"  said  the  phantom. 

They  went  from  window  to  window,  from 
land  to  land.  You  had  seen,  had  you  been 
out  that  night  in  Germany,  and  able  to  see 
visions,  an  imperious  figure  passing  from 
place  to  place,  looking  on  many  scenes. 
He  looked  on  them,  and  families  withered 
away,  and  happy  scenes  faded,  and  the 
phantom  said  to  him  "Come."  He  ex- 
postulated but  obeyed ;  and  so  they  went 
from  window  to  window  of  hundreds  of 
farms  in  Prussia,  till  they  came  to  the 
Prussian  border  and  went  on  into  Saxony ; 
and  always  you  would  have  heard,  could 
you  hear  spirits  speak,  "It  might  have 
been,"  "It  might  have  been,"  repeated 
from  window  to  window. 

They  went  down  through  Saxony,  head- 
ing for  Austria.  And  for  long  the  Kaiser 
kept  that  callous,  imperious  look.  But 
at  last  he,  even  he,  at  last  he  nearly  wept. 


THE   PUNISHMENT  91 

And  the  phantom  turned  then  and  swept 
him  back  over  Saxony,  and  into  Prussia 
again  and  over  the  sentries'  heads,  back  to 
his  comfortable  bed  where  it  was  so  hard 
to  sleep. 

And  though  they  had  seen  thousands  of 
merry  homes,  homes  that  can  never  be 
merry  now,  shrines  of  perpetual  mourning ; 
though  they  had  seen  thousands  of  smiling 
German  children,  who  will  never  be  born 
now,  but  were  only  the  visions  of  hopes 
blasted  by  him ;  for  all  the  leagues  over 
which  he  had  been  so  ruthlessly  hurried, 
dawn  was  yet  barely  breaking. 

He  had  looked  on  the  first  few  thousand 
homes  of  which  he  had  robbed  all  time,  and 
which  he  must  see  with  his  eyes  before  he 
may  go  hence.  The  first  night  of  the 
Kaiser's  punishment  was  accomplished. 


XIX 

THE  ENGLISH  SPIRIT 

BY  the  end  of  the  South  African  war 
Sergeant  Cane  had  got  one  thing 
very  well  fixed  in  his  mind,  and  that  was 
that  war  was  an  overrated  amusement. 
He  said  he  "was  fed  up  with  it",  partly 
because  that  misused  metaphor  was  then 
new,  partly  because  every  one  was  saying 
it :  he  felt  it  right  down  in  his  bones,  and 
he  had  a  long  memory.  So  when  wonder- 
ful rumours  came  to  the  East  Anglian 
village  where  he  lived,  on  August  1,  1914, 
Sergeant  Cane  said:  'That  means  war," 
and  decided  then  and  there  to  have  nothing 
to  do  with  it :  it  was  somebody  else's 
turn ;  he  felt  he  had  done  enough.  Then 
came  August  4th,  and  England  true  to  her 
destiny,  and  then  Lord  Kitchener's  appeal 
for  men.  Sergeant  Cane  had  a  family  to 

92 


THE   ENGLISH  SPIRIT          93 

look  after  and  a  nice  little  house :  he  had 
left  the  army  ten  years. 

In  the  next  week  all  the  men  went  who 
had  been  in  the  army  before,  all  that  were 
young  enough,  and  a  good  sprinkling  of 
the  young  men  too  who  had  never  been  in 
the  army.  Men  asked  Cane  if  he  was 
going,  and  he  said  straight  out  "No." 

By  the  middle  of  August  Cane  was  affect- 
ing the  situation.  He  was  a  little  rally- 
ing point  for  men  who  did  not  want  to  go. 
"He  knows  what  it's  like,"  they  said. 

In  the  smoking  room  of  the  Big  House 
sat  the  Squire  and  his  son,  Arthur  Smith ; 
and  Sir  Munion  Boomer-Platt,  the  Mem- 
ber for  the  division.  The  Squire's  son  had 
been  in  the  last  war  as  a  boy,  and  like 
Sergeant  Cane  had  left  the  army  since. 
All  the  morning  he  had  been  cursing  an 
imaginary  general,  seated  in  the  War  Office 
at  an  imaginary  desk  with  Smith's  own 
letter  before  him,  in  full  view  but  un- 
opened. Why  on  earth  didn't  he  answer 
it,  Smith  thought.  But  he  was  calmer 


94  TALES  OF  WAR 

now,  and  the  Squire  and  Sir  Munion  were 
talking  of  Sergeant  Cane. 

"Leave  him  to  me,"  said  Sir  Munion. 

"Very  well,"  said  the  Squire.  So  Sir 
Munion  Boomer-Platt  went  off  and  called 
on  Sergeant  Cane. 

Mrs.  Cane  knew  what  he  had  come  for. 

"Don't   let   him   talk   you   over,   Bill," 
she  said. 
'     "Not  he,"  said  Sergeant  Cane. 

Sir  Munion  came  on  Sergeant  Cane  in 
his  garden. 

"A  fine  day,"  said  Sir  Munion.  And 
from  that  he  went  on  to  the  war.  "If  you 
enlist,"  he  said,  "they  will  make  you  a  ser- 
geant again  at  once.  You  will  get  a  ser- 
geant's pay,  and  your  wife  will  get  the 
new  separation  allowance." 

"Sooner  have  Cane,"  said  Mrs.  Cane. 

"Yes,  yes,  of  course,"  said  Sir  Munion. 
"But  then  there  is  the  medal,  probably 
two  or  three  medals,  and  the  glory  of  it, 
and  it  is  such  a  splendid  life." 

Sir  Munion  did  warm  to  a  thing  when- 


THE   ENGLISH   SPIRIT          95 

ever  he  began  to  hear  his  own  words.  He 
painted  war  as  it  has  always  been  painted, 
one  of  the  most  beautiful  things  you  could 
imagine.  And  then  it  mustn't  be  sup- 
posed that  it  was  like  those  wars  that  there 
used  to  be,  a  long  way  oft7.  There  would  be 
houses  where  you  would  be  billeted,  and 
good  food,  and  shady  trees  and  villages 
wherever  you  went.  And  it  was  such  an 
opportunity  of  seeing  the  Continent  ("the 
Continent  as  it  really  is,"  Sir  Munion 
called  it)  as  would  never  come  again,  and 
he  only  wished  he  were  younger.  Sir 
Munion  really  did  wish  it,  as  he  spoke, 
for  his  own  words  stirred  him  profoundly ; 
but  somehow  or  other  they  did  not  stir 
Sergeant  Cane.  No,  he  had  done  his  share, 
and  he  had  a  family  to  look  after. 

Sir  Munion  could  not  understand  him : 
he  went  back  to  the  Big  House  and  said  so. 
He  had  told  him  all  the  advantages  he 
could  think  of  that  were  there  to  be  had 
for  the  asking,  and  Sergeant  Cane  merely 
neglected  them. 


96  TALES   OF   WAR 

"Let  me  have  a  try,"  said  Arthur  Smith. 
"He  soldiered  with  me  before." 

Sir  Munion  shrugged  his  shoulders.  He 
had  all  the  advantages  at  his  fingers'  ends, 
from  pay  to  billeting :  there  was  nothing 
more  to  be  said.  Nevertheless  young  Smith 
went. 

"Hullo,  Sergeant  Cane,"  said  Smith. 

"Hullo,  sir,"  said  the  sergeant. 

"Do  you  remember  that  night  at  Reit 
River?" 

"Don't  I,  sir,"  said  Cane. 

"  One  blanket  each  and  no  ground  sheet  ?  " 

"I  remember,  sir,"  said  Cane. 

"Didn't  it  rain,"  said  Smith. 

"It  rained  that  night,  proper." 

"Drowned  a  few  of  the  lice,  I  suppose." 

"Not  many,"  said  Cane. 

"No,  not  many,"  Smith  reflected.  "The 
Boers  had  the  range  all  right  that  time." 

"Gave  it  us  proper,"  said  Cane. 

"We  were  hungry  that  night,"  said 
Smith.  "I  could  have  eaten  biltong." 

"I  did  eat  some  of  it,"  said  Cane.     "Not 


THE  ENGLISH  SPIRIT          97 

bad  stuff,  what  there  was  of  it,  only  not 
enough." 

"I  don't  think,"  said  Smith,  "that  I've 
ever  slept  on  the  bare  earth  since." 

"No,  sir?"  said  Cane.  "It's  hard. 
You  get  used  to  it.  But  it  will  always 
be  hard." 

:'Yes,  it  will  always  be  hard,"  said 
Smith.  "Do  you  remember  the  time  we 
were  thirsty?" 

"Oh,  yes,  sir,"  said  Cane,  "I  remember 
that.  One  doesn't  forget  that." 

"No.  I  still  dream  of  it  sometimes," 
said  Smith.  "It  makes  a  nasty  dream. 
I  wake  with  my  mouth  all  dry  too,  when  I 
dream  that." 

"Yes,"  said  Cane,  "one  doesn't  forget 
being  thirsty." 

"Well,"  said  Smith,  "I  suppose  we're 
for  it  all  over  again  ?" 

"I  suppose  so,  sir,"  said  Cane. 


XX 

AN     INVESTIGATION     INTO     THE 
CAUSES  AND  ORIGIN  OF  THE  WAR 

THE  German  imperial  barber  has  been 
called  up.  He  must  have  been  called 
up  quite  early  in  the  war.  I  have  seen 
photographs  in  papers  that  leave  no  doubt 
of  that.  Who  he  is  I  do  not  know :  I 
once  read  his  name  in  an  article  but  have 
forgotten  it ;  few  even  know  if  he  still 
lives.  And  yet  what  harm  he  has  done ! 
What  vast  evils  he  has  unwittingly  origi- 
nated !  Many  years  ago  he  invented  a 
frivolity,  a  jeu  d' 'esprit  easily  forgivable  to 
an  artist  in  the  heyday  of  his  youth,  to 
whom  his  art  was  new  and  even  perhaps 
wonderful.  A  craft,  of  course,  rather  than 
an  art,  and  a  humble  craft  at  that ;  but 
then,  the  man  was  young,  and  what  will 
not  seem  wonderful  to  youth  ? 

98 


CAUSES  AND  ORIGIN  OF  WAR     99 

He  must  have  taken  the  craft  very  seri- 
ously, but  as  youth  takes  things  seriously, 
fantastically  and  with  laughter.  He  must 
have  determined  to  outshine  rivals :  he 
must  have  gone  away  and  thought,  burn- 
ing candles  late  perhaps,  when  all  the 
palace  was  still.  But  how  can  youth  think 
seriously  ?  And  there  had  come  to  him 
this  absurd,  this  fantastical  conceit.  What 
else  would  have  come?  The  more  seri- 
ously he  took  the  tonsorial  art,  the  more 
he  studied  its  tricks  and  phrases  and 
heard  old  barbers  lecture,  the  more  sure 
were  the  imps  of  youth  to  prompt  him  to 
laughter  and  urge  him  to  something  out- 
rageous and  ridiculous.  The  background 
of  the  dull  pomp  of  Potsdam  must  have 
made  all  this  more  certain.  It  was  bound  to 
come. 

And  so  one  day,  or,  as  I  have  suggested, 
suddenly  late  one  night,  there  came  to 
the  young  artist  bending  over  tonsorial 
books  that  quaint,  mad,  odd,  preposterous 
inspiration.  Ah,  what  pleasure  there  is  in 


100  TALES  OF  WAR 

the  madness  of  youth ;  it  is  not  like  the 
madness  of  age,  clinging  to  outworn  for- 
mulae ;  it  is  the  madness  of  breaking  away, 
of  galloping  among  precipices,  of  dallying 
with  the  impossible,  of  courting  the  absurd. 
And  this  inspiration,  it  was  in  none  of  the 
books;  the  lecturer  barbers  had  not  lec- 
tured on  it,  could  not  dream  of  it  and  did 
not  dare  to ;  there  was  no  tradition  for  it, 
no  precedent ;  it  was  mad ;  and  to  in- 
troduce it  into  the  pomp  of  Potsdam,  that 
was  the  daring  of  madness.  And  this 
preposterous  inspiration  of  the  absurd  young 
barber-madman  was  nothing  less  than  a 
moustache  that  without  any  curve  at  all, 
or  any  suggestion  of  sanity,  should  go 
suddenly  up  at  the  ends  very  nearly  as 
high  as  the  eyes  ! 

He  must  have  told  his  young  fellow 
craftsmen  first,  for  youth  goes  first  to 
youth  with  its  hallucinations.  And  they, 
what  could  they  have  said?  You  cannot 
say  of  madness  that  it  is  mad,  you  cannot 
call  absurdity  absurd.  To  have  criticized 


CAUSES  AND  ORIGIN  OF  WAR    101 

would  have  revealed  jealousy ;  and  as  for 
praise  you  could  not  praise  a  thing  like 
that.  They  probably  shrugged,  made  ges- 
tures ;  and  perhaps  one  friend  warned  him. 
But  you  cannot  warn  a  man  against  a 
madness ;  if  the  madness  is  in  possession 
it  will  not  be  warned  away  :  why  should  it  ? 
And  then  perhaps  he  went  to  the  old 
barbers  of  the  Court.  You  can  picture 
their  anger.  Age  does  not  learn  from  youth 
in  any  case.  But  there  was  the  insult  to 
their  ancient  craft,  bad  enough  if  only 
imagined,  but  here  openly  spoken  of.  And 
what  would  come  of  it  ?  They  must  have 
feared,  on  the  one  hand,  dishonour  to  their 
craft  if  this  young  barber  were  treated  as 
his  levity  deserved ;  and,  on  the  other 
hand,  could  they  have  feared  his  success? 
I  think  they  could  not  have  guessed  it. 

And  then  the  young  idiot  with  his  pre- 
posterous inspiration  must  have  looked 
about  to  see  where  he  could  practise  his 
new  absurdity.  It  should  have  been  enough 
to  have  talked  about  it  among  his  fellow 


102  TALES  OF  WAR 

barbers ;  they  would  have  gone  with  new 
zest  to  their  work  next  day  for  this  de- 
lirious interlude,  and  no  harm  would  have 
been  done.  "Fritz,"  (or  Hans)  they  would 
have  said,  "was  a  bit  on  last  night,  a  bit 
full  up,"  or  whatever  phrase  they  use  to 
touch  on  drunkenness ;  and  the  thing 
would  have  been  forgotten.  We  all  have 
our  fancies.  But  this  young  fool  wanted  to 
get  his  fancy  mixed  up  with  practice  :  that's 
where  he  was  mad.  And  in  Potsdam,  of 
all  places. 

He  probably  tried  his  friends  first,  young 
barbers  at  the  Court  and  others  of  his  own 
standing.  None  of  them  were  fools  enough 
to  be  seen  going  about  like  that.  They 
had  jobs  to  lose.  A  Court  barber  is  one 
thing,  a  man  who  cuts  ordinary  hair  is 
quite  another.  Why  should  they  become 
outcasts  because  their  friend  chose  to  be 
mad? 

He  probably  tried  his  inferiors  then,  but 
they  would  have  been  timid  folk ;  they 
must  have  seen  the  thing  was  absurd,  and 


CAUSES  AND  ORIGIN  OF  WAR    103 

of  course  daren't  risk  it.  Again,  why 
should  they  ? 

Did  he  try  to  get  some  noble  then  to 
patronize  his  invention  ?  Probably  the  first 
refusals  he  had  soon  inflamed  his  madness 
more,  and  he  threw  caution  insanely  to  the 
winds,  and  went  straight  to  the  Emperor. 

It  was  probably  about  the  time  that  the 
Emperor  dismissed  Bismarck ;  certainly 
the  drawings  of  that  time  show  him  still 
with  a  sane  moustache. 

The  young  barber  probably  chanced  on 
him  in  this  period,  finding  him  bereft  of 
an  adviser,  and  ready  to  be  swayed  by 
whatever  whim  should  come.  Perhaps  he 
was  attracted  by  the  barber's  hardihood, 
perhaps  the  absurdity  of  his  inspiration 
had  some  fascination  for  him,  perhaps  he 
merely  saw  that  the  thing  was  new  and, 
feeling  jaded,  let  the  barber  have  his  way. 
And  so  the  frivolity  became  a  fact,  the  ab- 
surdity became  visible,  and  honour  and 
riches  came  the  way  of  the  barber. 

A  small  thing,  you  might  say,  however 


104  TALES  OF  WAR 

fantastical.  And  yet  I  believe  the  ab- 
surdity of  that  barber  to  be  among  the 
great  evils  that  have  brought  death  nearer 
to  man ;  whimsical  and  farcical  as  it  was, 
yet  a  thing  deadlier  than  Helen's  beauty 
or  Tamerlane's  love  of  skulls.  For  just 
as  character  is  outwardly  shown  so  out- 
ward things  react  upon  the  character ; 
and  who,  with  that  daring  barber's  ludi- 
crous fancy  visible  always  on  his  face,  could 
quite  go  the  sober  way  of  beneficent  mon- 
archs  ?  The  fantasy  must  be  mitigated 
here,  set  off  there  ;  had  you  such  a  figure  to 
dress,  say  for  amateur  theatricals,  you 
would  realize  the  difficulty.  The  heavy 
silver  eagle  to  balance  it ;  the  glittering 
cuirass  lower  down,  preventing  the  eye 
from  dwelling  too  long  on  the  barber's 
absurdity.  And  then  the  pose  to  go  with 
the  cuirass  and  to  carry  off  the  wild  con- 
ceit of  that  mad,  mad  barber.  He  has 
much  to  answer  for,  that  eccentric  man 
whose  name  so  few  remember.  For  pose 
led  to  actions ;  and  just  when  Europe 


CAUSES  AND  ORIGIN  OF  WAR     105 

most  needed  a  man  of  wise  counsels,  re- 
straining the  passions  of  great  empires, 
just  then  she  had  ruling  over  Germany  and, 
unhappily,  dominating  Austria,  a  man  who 
every  year  grew  more  akin  to  the  folly 
of  that  silly  barber's  youthful  inspiration. 

Let  us  forgive  the  barber.  For  long  I 
have  known  from  pictures  that  I  have 
seen  of  the  Kaiser  that  he  has  gone  to  the 
trenches.  Probably  he  is  dead.  Let  us 
forgive  the  barber.  But  let  us  bear  in 
mind  that  the  futile  fancies  of  youth  may 
be  deadly  things,  and  that  one  of  them 
falling  on  a  fickle  mind  may  so  stir  its 
shallows  as  to  urge  it  to  disturb  and  set  in 
motion  the  avalanches  of  illimitable  grief. 


XXI 

LOST 

DESCRIBING  a  visit,  say  the   papers 
of    March    28th,    which    the    Kaiser 
paid    incognito   to    Cologne    Cathedral   on 
March   18th   before  the  great   battle,   the 
Cologne  correspondent  of  the  Tyd  says : 

There  were  only  a  few  persons  in  the 
building.  Under  high  arches  and  in  spa- 
cious solitude  the  Kaiser  sat,  as  if  in  deep 
thought,  before  the  priests'  choir.  Behind 
him  his  military  staff  stood  respectfully 
at  a  distance.  Still  musing  as  he  rose, 
the  monarch  resting  both  hands  on  his 
walking-stick  remains  standing  immovable 
for  some  minutes.  ...  I  shall  never  for- 
get this  picture  of  the  musing  monarch 
praying  in  Cologne  Cathedral  on  the  eve 
of  the  great  battle. 

Probably  he  won't  forget  it.  The  Ger- 
man casualty  lists  will  help  to  remind  him. 
But  what  is  more  to  the  point  is  that 

106 


LOST  107 

this  expert  propagandist  has  presumably 
received  orders  that  we  are  not  to  forget 
it,  and  that  the  sinister  originator  of  the 
then  impending  holocaust  should  be  toned 
down  a  little  in  the  eyes  at  least  of  the 
Tyd  to  something  a  little  more  amiable. 

And  no  doubt  the  little  piece  of  propa- 
ganda gave  every  satisfaction  to  those  who 
ordered  it,  or  they  would  not  have  passed 
it  out  to  the  Tyd,  and  the  touching  little 
scene  would  never  have  reached  our  eyes. 
At  the  same  time  the  little  tale  would  have 
been  better  suited  to  the  psychology  of 
other  countries  if  he  had  made  the  War 
Lord  kneel  when  he  prayed  in  Cologne 
Cathedral,  and  if  he  had  represented  the 
Military  Staff  as  standing  out  of  respect 
to  One  who,  outside  Germany,  is  held  in 
greater  respect  than  the  All  Highest. 

And  had  the  War  Lord  really  knelt  is 
it  not  possible  that  he  might  have  found 
pity,  humility,  or  even  contrition  ?  Things 
easily  overlooked  in  so  large  a  cathedral 
when  sitting  erect,  as  a  War  Lord,  before 


108  TALES  OF  WAR 

the  priests'  choir,  but  to  be  noticed  per- 
haps with  one's  eyes  turned  to  the  ground. 

Perhaps  he  nearly  found  one  of  those 
things.  Perhaps  he  felt  (who  knows?) 
just  for  a  moment,  that  in  the  dimness  of 
those  enormous  aisles  was  something  he  had 
lost  a  long,  long  while  ago. 

One  is  not  mistaken  to  credit  the  very 
bad  with  feeling  far,  faint  appeals  from 
things  of  glory  like  Cologne  Cathedral; 
it  is  that  the  appeals  come  to  them  too  far 
and  faint  on  their  headlong  descent  to  ruin. 

For  what  was  the  War  Lord  seeking? 
Did  he  know  that  pity  for  his  poor  slaugh- 
tered people,  huddled  by  him  on  to  our 
ceaseless  machine  guns,  might  be  found  by 
seeking  there?  Or  was  it  only  that  the 
lost  thing,  whatever  it  was,  made  that 
faint  appeal  to  him,  passing  the  door  by 
chance,  and  drew  him  in,  as  the  scent  of 
some  herb  or  flower  in  a  moment  draws  us 
back  years  to  look  for  something  lost  in 
our  youth ;  we  gaze  back,  wondering,  and 
do  not  find  it. 


LOST  109 

And  to  think  that  perhaps  he  lost  it  by 
very  little !  That,  but  for  that  proud  at- 
titude and  the  respectful  staff,  he  might 
have  seen  what  was  lost,  and  have  come 
out  bringing  pity  for  his  people.  Might 
have  said  to  the  crowd  that  gave  him  that 
ovation,  as  we  read,  outside  the  door : 
"My  pride  has  driven  you  to  this  needless 
war,  my  ambition  has  made  a  sacrifice  of 
millions,  but  it  is  over,  and  it  shall  be  no 
more ;  I  will  make  no  more  conquests." 

They  would  have  killed  him.  But  for 
that  renunciation,  perhaps,  however  late, 
the  curses  of  the  widows  of  his  people 
might  have  kept  away  from  his  grave. 

But  he  did  not  find  it.  He  sat  at  prayer. 
Then  he  stood.  Then  he  marched  out : 
and  his  staff  marched  out  behind  him.  And 
in  the  gloom  of  the  floor  of  the  vast  Cologne 
Cathedral  lie  the  things  that  the  Kaiser 
did  not  find  and  never  will  find  now. 
Unnoticed  thus,  and  in  some  silent  moment, 
passes  a  man's  last  chance. 


XXII 

THE  LAST  MIRAGE 

THE  desolation  that  the  German  offen- 
sive has  added  to  the  dominions  of 
the  Kaiser  cannot  easily  be  imagined  by 
any  one  who  has  never  seen  a  desert. 
Look  at  it  on  the  map  and  it  is  full  of  the 
names  of  towns  and  villages ;  it  is  in 
Europe,  where  there  are  no  deserts;  it  is 
a  fertile  province  among  places  of  famous 
names.  Surely  it  is  a  proud  addition 
to  an  ambitious  monarch's  possessions. 
Surely  there  is  something  there  that  it  is 
worth  while  to  have  conquered  at  the  cost 
of  army  corps.  No,  nothing.  They  are 
mirage  towns.  The  farms  grow  Dead  Sea 
fruit.  France  recedes  before  the  imperial 
clutch.  France  smiles,  but  not  for  him. 
His  new  towns  seem  to  be  his  because 
their  names  have  not  yet  been  removed 
no 


THE   LAST   MIRAGE  111 

from  any  map,  but  they  crumble  at  his 
approach  because  France  is  not  for  him. 
His  deadly  ambition  makes  a  waste  be- 
fore it  as  it  goes,  clutching  for  cities.  It 
comes  to  them  and  the  cities  are  not  there. 

I  have  seen  mirages  and  have  heard 
others  told  of,  but  the  best  mirages  of  all 
we  never  hear  described ;  the  mirage  that 
waterless  travellers  see  at  the  last.  Those 
fountains  rising  out  of  onyx  basins,  blue 
and  straight  into  incredible  heights,  and 
falling  and  flooding  cool  white  marble ; 
the  haze  of  spray  above  their  feathery 
heads  through  which  the  pale  green  domes 
of  weathered  copper  shimmer  and  shake 
a  little ;  mysterious  temples,  the  tombs  of 
unknown  kings  ;  the  cataracts  coming  down 
from  rose-quartz  cliffs,  far  off  but  seen 
quite  clearly,  growing  to  rivers  bearing 
curious  barges  to  the  golden  courts  of 
Sahara.  These  things  we  never  see;  they 
are  seen  at  the  last  by  men  who  die  of 
thirst. 

Even  so  has  the  Kaiser  looked  at  the 


TALES  OF  WAR 

smiling  plains  of  France.  Even  so  has  he 
looked  on  her  famous  ancient  cities  and 
the  farms  and  the  fertile  fields  and  the 
woods  and  orchards  of  Picardy.  With 
effort  and  trouble  he  has  moved  towards 
them.  As  he  comes  near  to  them  the 
cities  crumble,  the  woods  shrivel  and  fall, 
the  farms  fade  out  of  Picardy,  even  the 
hedgerows  go ;  it  is  bare,  bare  desert. 
He  had  been  sure  of  Paris,  he  had  dreamed 
of  Versailles  and  some  monstrous  corona- 
tion, he  had  thought  his  insatiable  avarice 
would  be  sated.  For  he  had  plotted  for 
conquest  of  the  world,  that  boundless  greed 
of  his  goading  him  on  as  a  man  in  the  grip 
of  thirst  broods  upon  lakes. 

He  sees  victory  near  him  now.  That 
also  will  fade  in  the  desert  of  old  barbed 
wire  and  weeds.  When  will  he  see  that 
a  doom  is  over  all  his  ambitions?  For 
his  dreams  of  victory  are  like  those  last 
dreams  that  come  in  deceptive  deserts  to 
dying  men. 

There   is  nothing  good  for  him   in   the 


THE   LAST  MIRAGE  113 

desert  of  the  Somme.  Bapaume  is  not 
really  there,  though  it  be  marked  on  his 
maps;  it  is  only  a  wilderness  of  slates  and 
brick.  Peronne  looks  like  a  city  a  long 
way  off,  but  when  you  come  near  it  is 
only  the  shells  of  houses.  Poziere,  Le 
Sars,  Sapigny,  are  gone  altogether. 

And  all  is  Dead  Sea  fruit  in  a  visible 
desert.  The  reports  of  German  victories 
there  are  mirage  like  all  the  rest ;  they  too 
will  fade  into  weeds  and  old  barbed  wire. 

And  the  advances  that  look  like  vic- 
tories, and  the  ruins  that  look  like  cities, 
and  the  shell-beaten  broken  fields  that 
look  like  farms, --they  and  the  dreams 
of  conquest  and  all  the  plots  and  ambi- 
tions, they  are  all  the  mirage  of  a  dying 
dynasty  in  a  desert  it  made  for  its  doom. 

Bones  lead  up  to  the  desert,  bones  are 
scattered  about  it,  it  is  the  most  menacing 
and  calamitous  waste  of  all  the  deadly 
places  that  have  been  inclement  to  man. 
It  flatters  the  Hohenzollerns  with  visions 
of  victory  now  because  they  are  doomed 


114  TALES  OF  WAR 

by  it  and  are  about  to  die.  When  their 
race  has  died  the  earth  shall  smile  again, 
for  their  deadly  mirage  shall  oppress  us 
no  more.  The  cities  shall  rise  again  and 
the  farms  come  back;  hedgerows  and 
orchards  shall  be  seen  again ;  the  woods 
shall  slowly  lift  their  heads  from  the  dust ; 
and  gardens  shall  come  again  where  the 
desert  was,  to  bloom  in  happier  ages  that 
forget  the  Hohenzollerns. 


XXIII 
A  FAMOUS  MAN 

LAST  winter  a  famous  figure  walked 
in  Behagnies.  Soldiers  came  to  see 
him  from  their  billets  all  down  the  Arras 
road,  from  Ervillers  and  from  Sapigny, 
and  from  the  ghosts  of  villages  back  from 
the  road,  places  that  once  were  villages 
but  are  only  names  now.  They  would 
walk  three  or  four  miles,  those  who  could 
not  get  lorries,  for  his  was  one  of  those 
names  that  all  men  know,  not  such  a  name 
as  a  soldier  or  poet  may  win,  but  a  name 
that  all  men  know.  They  used  to  go  there 
at  evening. 

Four  miles  away  on  the  left  as  you  went 

from    Ervillers,    the    guns    mumbled    over 

the  hills,  low  hills  over  which  the  Verys 

from  the  trenches  put  up  their  heads  and 

115 


116  TALES  OF  WAR 

peered  around,  —  greeny,  yellowy  heads 
that  turned  the  sky  sickly,  and  the  clouds 
lit  up  and  went  grey  again  all  the  night 
long.  As  you  got  near  to  Behagnies  you 
lost  sight  of  the  Verys,  but  the  guns 
mumbled  on.  A  silly  little  train  used  to 
run  on  one's  left,  which  used  to  whistle 
loudly,  as  though  it  asked  to  be  shelled,  but 
I  never  saw  a  shell  coming  its  way  ;  perhaps 
it  knew  that  the  German  gunners  could  not 
calculate  how  slow  it  went.  It  crossed  the 
road  as  you  got  down  to  Behagnies. 

You  passed  the  graves  of  two  or  three 
German  soldiers  with  their  names  on  white 
wooden  crosses,  —  men  killed  in  1914  ;  and 
then  a  little  cemetery  of  a  French  cavalry 
regiment,  where  a  big  cross  stood  in  the 
middle  with  a  wreath  and  a  tricolor  badge, 
and  the  names  of  the  men.  And  then  one 
saw  trees.  That  was  always  a  wonder, 
whether  one  saw  their  dark  shapes  in  the 
evening,  or  whether  one  saw  them  by  day, 
and  knew  from  the  look  of  their  leaves 
whether  autumn  had  come  yet,  or  gone. 


A   FAMOUS   MAN  117 

In  winter  at  evening  one  just  saw  the  black 
bulk  of  them,  but  that  was  no  less  marvel- 
lous than  seeing  them  green  in  summer ; 
trees  by  the  side  of  the  Arras-Bapaume 
road,  trees  in  mid-desert  in  the  awful 
region  of  Somme.  There  were  not  many 
of  them,  just  a  cluster,  fewer  than  the 
date  palms  in  an  oasis  in  Sahara,  but 
an  oasis  is  an  oasis  wherever  you  find  it, 
and  a  few  trees  make  it.  There  are  little 
places  here  and  there,  few  enough  as  the 
Arabs  know,  that  the  Sahara's  deadly  sand 
has  never  been  able  to  devastate ;  and 
there  are  places  even  in  the  Somme  that 
German  malice,  obeying  the  Kaiser  as  the 
sand  of  Sahara  obeys  the  accursed  sirocco, 
has  not  been  able  to  destroy  quite  to  the 
uttermost.  That  little  cluster  of  trees  at 
Behagnies  is  one  of  these ;  Divisional 
Headquarters  used  to  shelter  beneath  them  ; 
and  near  them  was  a  statue  on  a  lawn  which 
probably  stood  by  the  windows  of  some  fine 
house,  though  there  is  no  trace  of  the  house 
but  the  lawn  and  that  statue  now. 


118  TALES  OF  WAR 

And  over  the  way  on  the  left  a  little 
further  on,  just  past  the  officers'  club,  a 
large  hall  stood  where  one  saw  that  famous 
figure,  whom  officers  and  men  alike  would 
come  so  far  to  see. 

The  hall  would  hold  perhaps  four  or 
five  hundred  seats  in  front  of  a  stage  fitted 
up  very  simply  with  red,  white  and  blue 
cloths,  but  fitted  up  by  some  one  that 
understood  the  job ;  and  at  the  back  of 
that  stage  on  those  winter  evenings  walked 
on  his  flat  and  world-renowned  feet  the 
figure  of  Charlie  Chaplin. 

When  aeroplanes  came  over  bombing, 
the  dynamos  used  to  stop  for  they  sup- 
plied light  to  other  places  besides  the 
cinema,  and  the  shade  of  Charlie  Chaplin 
would  fade  away.  But  the  men  would 
wait  till  the  aeroplanes  had  gone  and  that 
famous  figure  came  waddling  back  to  the 
screen.  There  he  amused  tired  men  newly 
come  from  the  trenches,  there  he  brought 
laughter  to  most  of  the  twelve  days  that 
they  had  out  of  the  line. 


A  FAMOUS   MAN  119 

He  is  gone  from  Behagnies  now.  He  did 
not  march  in  the  retreat  a  little  apart 
from  the  troops,  with  head  bent  for- 
ward and  hand  thrust  in  jacket,  a  flat- 
footed  Napoleon :  yet  he  is  gone ;  for  no 
one  would  have  left  behind  for  the  enemy 
so  precious  a  thing  as  a  Charlie  Chaplin 
film.  He  is  gone  but  he  will  return.  He 
will  come  with  his  cane  one  day  along  that 
Arras  road  to  the  old  hut  in  Behagnies ; 
and  men  dressed  in  brown  will  welcome 
him  there  again. 

He  will  pass  beyond  it  through  those 
desolate  plains,  and  over  the  hills  beyond 
them,  beyond  Bapaume.  Far  hamlets  to 
the  east  will  know  his  antics. 

And  one  day  surely,  in  old  familiar  garb, 
without  court  dress,  without  removing  his 
hat,  armed  with  that  flexible  cane,  he  will 
walk  over  the  faces  of  the  Prussian  Guard 
and,  picking  up  the  Kaiser  by  the  collar, 
with  infinite  nonchalance  in  finger  and 
thumb,  will  place  him  neatly  in  a  prone 
position  and  solemnly  sit  on  his  chest. 


XXIV 
THE  OASES  OF  DEATH 

WHILE  the  German  guns  were  pound- 
ing Amiens  and  the  battle  of  dull 
Prussianism  against  Liberty  raged  on,  they 
buried  Richthofen  in  the  British  lines. 

They  had  laid  him  in  a  large  tent  with 
his  broken  machine  outside  it.  Thence 
British  airmen  carried  him  to  the  quiet 
cemetery,  and  he  was  buried  among  the 
cypresses  in  this  old  resting  place  of  French 
generations  just  as  though  he  had  come 
there  bringing  no  harm  to  France. 

Five  wreaths  were  on  his  coffin,  placed 
there  by  those  who  had  fought  against 
him  up  in  the  air.  And  under  the  wreaths 
on  the  coffin  was  spread  the  German  flag. 

When  the  funeral  service  was  over  three 
volleys  were  fired  by  the  escort,  and  a 
hundred  aviators  paid  their  last  respects 

120 


THE   OASES  OF  DEATH 

to  the  grave  of  their  greatest  enemy; 
for  the  chivalry  that  the  Prussians  have 
driven  from  earth  and  sea  lives  on  in  the 
blue  spaces  of  the  air. 

They  buried  Richthofen  at  evening,  and 
the  planes  came  droning  home  as  they 
buried  him,  and  the  German  guns  roared 
on  and  guns  answered,  defending  Amiens. 
And  in  spite  of  all,  the  cemetery  had  the 
air  of  quiet,  remaining  calm  and  aloof,  as 
all  French  graveyards  are.  For  they  seem 
to  have  no  part  in  the  cataclysm  that 
shakes  all  the  world  but  them ;  they  seem 
to  withdraw  amongst  memories  and  to  be 
aloof  from  time,  and,  above  all,  to  be  quite 
untroubled  by  the  war  that  rages  to-day, 
upon  which  they  appear  to  look  out  list- 
lessly from  among  their  cypress  and  yew, 
and  dimly,  down  a  vista  of  centuries.  They 
are  very  strange,  these  little  oases  of  death 
that  remain  unmoved  and  green  with  their 
trees  still  growing,  in  the  midst  of  a  desola- 
tion as  far  as  the  eye  can  see,  in  which 
cities  and  villages  and  trees  and  hedges 


122  TALES  OF  WAR 

and  farms  and  fields  and  churches  are  all 
gone,  and  where  hugely  broods  a  desert. 
It  is  as  though  Death,  stalking  up  and  down 
through  France  for  four  years,  sparing 
nothing,  had  recognized  for  his  own  his 
little  gardens,  and  had  spared  only  them. 


XXV 
ANGLO-SAXON  TYRANNY 

'T  \  7E  need  a  sea,"  says  Big- Admiral 
V  V  von Tirpitz,  "freed of  Anglo-Saxon 
tyranny."  Unfortunately  neither  the  Brit- 
ish Admiralty  nor  the  American  Navy 
permit  us  to  know  how  much  of  the 
Anglo-Saxon  tyranny  is  done  by  American 
destroyers  and  how  much  by  British  ships 
and  even  trawlers.  It  would  interest  both 
countries  to  know,  if  it  could  be  known. 
But  the  Big-Admiral  is  unjust  to  France, 
for  the  French  navy  exerts  a  tyranny  at 
sea  that  can  by  no  means  be  overlooked, 
although  naturally  from  her  position  in 
front  of  the  mouth  of  the  Elbe  England 
practises  the  culminating  insupportable 
tyranny  of  keeping  the  High  Seas  Fleet  in 
the  Kiel  Canal. 

It  is  not  I,  but   the   Big-Admiral,  who 

123 


124  TALES  OF  WAR 

chose  the  word  tyranny  as  descriptive  of 
the  activities  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  navies. 
He  was  making  a  speech  at  Dusseldorf  on 
May  25th  and  was  reported  in  the  Dussel- 
dorf er  Nachrichten  on  May  27th. 

Naturally  it  does  not  seem  like  tyranny 
to  us,  even  the  contrary ;  but  for  an  ad- 
miral, ein  Grosse-Admiral,  lately  command- 
ing a  High  Seas  Fleet,  it  must  have  been 
more  galling  than  we  perhaps  can  credit 
to  be  confined  in  a  canal.  There  was  he, 
who  should  have  been  breasting  the  blue, 
or  at  any  rate  doing  something  salty  and 
nautical,  far  out  in  the  storms  of  that  sea 
that  the  Germans  call  an  Ocean,  with  the 
hurricane  raging  angrily  in  his  whiskers  and 
now  and  then  wafting  tufts  of  them  aloft 
to  white  the  halyards ;  there  was  he  con- 
strained to  a  command  the  duties  of  which 
however  nobly  he  did  them  could  be 
equally  well  carried  out  by  any  respectable 
bargee.  He  hoped  for  a  piracy  of  which 
the  Lusitania  was  merely  a  beginning;  he 
looked  for  the  bombardment  of  innumer- 


ANGLO-SAXON  TYRANNY     125 

able  towns ;  he  pictured  slaughter  in  many 
a  hamlet  of  fishermen ;  he  planned  more 
than  all  those  things  of  which  U-boat 
commanders  are  guilty;  he  saw  himself  a 
murderous  old  man,  terrible  to  seafarers, 
and  a  scourge  of  the  coasts,  and  fancied 
himself  chronicled  in  after  years  by  such 
as  told  dark  tales  of  Captain  Kidd  or  the 
awful  buccaneers ;  but  he  followed  in  the 
end  no  more  desperate  courses  than  to 
sit  and  watch  his  ships  on  a  wharf  near 
Kiel  like  one  of  Jacob's  night  watchmen. 

No  wonder  that  what  appears  to  us  no 
more  than  the  necessary  protection  of 
women  and  children  in  seacoast  towns 
from  murder  should  be  to  him  an  intoler- 
able tyranny.  No  wonder  that  the  guard- 
ing of  travellers  of  the  allied  countries  at 
sea,  and  even  those  of  the  neutrals,  should 
be  a  most  galling  thing  to  the  Big-Admiral's 
thwarted  ambition,  looking  at  it  from  the 
point  of  view  of  one  who  to  white-whiskered 
age  has  retained  the  schoolboy's  natural 
love  of  the  black  and  yellow  flag.  A 


126  TALES  OF  WAR 

pirate,  he  would  say,  has  as  much  right  to 
live  as  wasps  or  tigers.  The  Anglo-Saxon 
navies,  he  might  argue,  have  a  certain  code 
of  rules  for  use  at  sea ;  they  let  women  get 
first  into  the  boats,  for  instance,  when 
ships  are  sinking,  and  they  rescue  drown- 
ing mariners  when  they  can :  no  actual 
harm  in  all  this,  he  would  feel,  though  it 
would  weaken  you,  as  Hindenburg  said  of 
poetry ;  but  if  all  these  little  rules  are 
tyrannously  enforced  on  those  who  may 
think  them  silly,  what  is  to  become  of  the 
pirate?  Where,  if  people  like  Beattie  and 
Sims  had  always  had  their  way,  would  be 
those  rollicking  tales  of  the  jolly  Spanish 
Main,  and  men  walking  the  plank  into  the 
big  blue  sea,  and  long,  low,  rakish  craft 
putting  in  to  Indian  harbours  with  a  cargo 
of  men  and  women  all  hung  from  the  yard- 
arm  ?  A  melancholy  has  come  over  the 
spirit  of  Big-Admiral  von  Tirpitz  in  the 
years  he  has  spent  in  the  marshes  between 
the  Elbe  and  Kiel,  and  in  that  melancholy 
he  sees  romance  crushed ;  he  sees  no  more 


ANGLO-SAXON  TYRANNY     127 

pearl  earrings  and  little  gold  rings  in  the 
hold ;  he  sees  British  battleships  spoiling 
the  Spanish  Main,  and  hateful  American 
cruisers  in  the  old  Sargasso  Sea ;  he  sees 
himself,  alas,  the  last  of  all  the  pirates. 

Let  him  take  comfort.  There  were  al- 
ways pirates.  And  in  spite  of  the  tyranny 
of  England  and  America,  and  of  France, 
which  the  poor  old  man  perplexed  with  his 
troubles  forgot,  there  will  be  pirates  still. 
Not  many  perhaps,  but  enough  U-boats 
will  always  be  able  to  slip  through  that 
tyrannous  blockade  to  spread  indiscrimi- 
nate slaughter  amongst  the  travellers  of 
any  nation,  enough  to  hand  on  the  old 
traditions  of  murder  at  sea.  And  one  day 
Captain  Kidd,  with  such  a  bow  as  they  used 
to  make  in  ports  of  the  Spanish  Main, 
will  take  off  his  ancient  hat,  sweeping  it 
low  in  Hell,  and  be  proud  to  clasp  the 
hand  of  the  Lord  of  the  Kiel  Canal. 


XXVI 

MEMORIES 

"...  f ar-off  things 
And  battles  long  ago." 

THOSE  who  live  in  an  old  house  are 
necessarily  more  concerned  with  pay- 
ing the  plumber,  should  his  art  be  required, 
or  choosing  wall  paper  that  does  not  clash 
with  the  chintzes,  than  with  the  traditions 
that  may  haunt  its  corridors.  In  Ireland, — 
and  no  one  knows  how  old  that  is,  for  the 
gods  that  lived  there  before  the  Red  Branch 
came  wrote  few  chronicles  on  the  old  grey 
Irish  stones  and  wrote  in  their  own  language, 
—  in  Ireland  we  are  more  concerned  with 
working  it  so  that  Tim  Flanagan  gets  the 
job  he  does  be  looking  for. 

But  in  America  those  who  remember 
Ireland  remember  her,  very  often,  from  old 
generations;  maybe  their  grandfather  mi- 

128 


MEMORIES  129 

grated,  perhaps  his  grandfather,  and  Ire- 
land is  remembered  by  old  tales  treasured 
among  them.  Now  Tim  Flanagan  will 
not  be  remembered  in  a  year's  time  when 
he  has  the  job  for  which  he  has  got  us  to 
agitate,  and  the  jobberies  that  stir  us  move 
not  the  pen  of  History. 

But  the  tales  that  Irish  generations 
hand  down  beyond  the  Atlantic  have  to  be 
tales  that  are  worth  remembering.  They 
are  tales  that  have  to  stand  the  supreme 
test,  tales  that  a  child  will  listen  to  by  the 
fireside  of  an  evening,  so  that  they  go  down 
with  those  early  remembered  evenings  that 
are  last  of  all  to  go  of  the  memories  of  a 
lifetime.  A  tale  that  a  child  will  listen  to 
must  have  much  grandeur.  Any  cheap 
stuff  will  do  for  us,  bad  journalism,  and 
novels  by  girls  that  could  get  no  other  jobs  ; 
but  a  child  looks  for  those  things  in  a  tale 
that  are  simple  and  noble  and  epic,  the 
things  that  Earth  remembers.  And  so 
they  tell,  over  there,  tales  of  Sarsfield  and 
of  the  old  Irish  Brigade ;  they  tell,  of  an 


130  TALES   OF  WAR 

evening,  of  Owen  Roe  O'Neill.  And  into 
those  tales  come  the  plains  of  Flanders 
again  and  the  ancient  towns  of  France, 
towns  famous  long  ago  and  famous  yet : 
let  us  rather  think  of  them  as  famous  names 
and  not  as  the  sad  ruins  we  have  seen, 
melancholy  by  day  and  monstrous  in  the 
moonlight. 

Many  an  Irishman  who  sails  from  Amer- 
ica for  those  historic  lands  knows  that  the 
old  trees  that  stand  there  have  their  roots 
far  down  in  soil  once  richened  by  Irish 
blood.  When  the  Boyne  was  lost  and  won, 
and  Ireland  had  lost  her  King,  many  an 
Irishman  with  all  his  wealth  in  a  scabbard 
looked  upon  exile  as  his  sovereign's  court. 
And  so  they  came  to  the  lands  of  foreign 
kings,  with  nothing  to  offer  for  the  hos- 
pitality that  was  given  them  but  a  sword ; 
and  it  usually  was  a  sword  with  which  kings 
were  well  content.  Louis  XV  had  many 
of  them,  and  was  glad  to  have  them  at 
Fontenoy ;  the  Spanish  King  admitted 
them  to  the  Golden  Fleece ;  they  defended 


MEMORIES  131 

Maria  Theresa.  Landen  in  Flanders  and 
Cremona  knew  them.  A  volume  were 
needed  to  tell  of  all  those  swords ;  more 
than  one  Muse  has  remembered  them.  It 
was  not  disloyalty  that  drove  them  forth ; 
their  King  was  gone,  they  followed,  the 
oak  was  smitten  and  brown  were  the  leaves 
of  the  tree. 

But  no  such  mournful  metaphor  applies 
to  the  men  who  march  to-day  towards  the 
plains  where  the  "Wild  Geese"  were  driven. 
They  go  with  no  country  mourning  them, 
but  their  whole  land  cheers  them  on ;  they 
go  to  the  inherited  battlefields.  And  there 
is  this  difference  in  their  attitude  to  kings, 
that  those  knightly  Irishmen  of  old,  driven 
homeless  over-sea,  appeared  as  exiles  sup- 
pliant for  shelter  before  the  face  of  the 
Grand  Monarch,  and  he,  no  doubt  with 
exquisite  French  grace,  gave  back  to  them 
all  they  had  lost  except  what  was  lost  for- 
ever, salving  so  far  as  he  could  the  in- 
justice suffered  by  each.  But  to-day  when 
might,  for  its  turn,  is  in  the  hands  of  de- 


TALES  OF  WAR 

mocracies,  the  men  whose  fathers  built  the 
Statue  of  Liberty  have  left  their  country 
to  bring  back  an  exiled  king  to  his  home, 
and  to  right  what  can  be  righted  of  the 
ghastly  wrongs  of  Flanders. 

And  if  men's  prayers  are  heard,  as  many 
say,  old  saints  will  hear  old  supplications 
going  up  by  starlight  with  a  certain  wist- 
ful, musical  intonation  that  has  linked  the 
towns  of  Limerick  and  Cork  with  the  fields 
of  Flanders  before. 


XXVII 
THE  MOVEMENT 

FOR  many  years  Eliphaz  Griggs  was 
comparatively  silent.  Not  that  he 
did  not  talk  on  all  occasions  whenever  he 
could  find  hearers,  he  did  that  at  great 
length ;  but  for  many  years  he  addressed 
no  public  meeting,  and  was  no  part  of  the 
normal  life  of  the  northeast  end  of  Hyde 
Park  or  Trafalgar  Square.  And  then  one 
day  he  was  talking  in  a  public  house  where 
he  had  gone  to  talk  on  the  only  subject  that 
was  dear  to  him.  He  waited,  as  was  his 
custom,  until  five  or  six  men  were  present, 
and  then  he  began.  "  Ye're  all  damned, 
I'm  saying,  damned  from  the  day  you  were 
born.  Your  portion  is  Tophet." 

And  on  that  day  there  happened  what 
had  never  happened  in  his  experience  be- 

133 


134  TALES  OF  WAR 

fore.  Men  used  to  listen  in  a  tolerant  way, 
and  say  little  over  their  beer,  for  that  is  the 
English  custom ;  and  that  would  be  all. 
But  to-day  a  man  rose  up  with  flashing 
eyes  and  went  over  to  Eliphaz  and  gripped 
him  by  the  hand:  "They're  all  damned," 
said  the  stranger. 

That  was  the  turning  point  in  the  life 
of  Eliphaz.  Up  to  that  moment  he  had 
been  a  lonely  crank,  and  men  thought  he 
was  queer;  but  now  there  were  two  of 
them  and  he  became  a  Movement.  A 
Movement  in  England  may  do  what  it 
likes :  there  was  a  Movement,  before  the 
War,  for  spoiling  tulips  in  Kew  Gardens 
and  breaking  church  windows ;  it  had  its 
run  like  the  rest. 

The  name  of  Eliphaz's  new  friend  was 
Ezekiel  Pirn :  and  they  drew  up  rules  for 
their  Movement  almost  at  once ;  and  very 
soon  country  inns  knew  Eliphaz  no  more. 
And  for  some  while  they  missed  him  where 
he  used  to  drop  in  of  an  evening  to  tell  them 
they  were  all  damned ;  and  then  a  man 


THE   MOVEMENT  135 

proved  one  day  that  the  earth  was  flat,  and 
they  all  forgot  Eliphaz. 

But  Eliphaz  went  to  Hyde  Park  and 
Ezekiel  Pirn  went  with  him,  and  there  you 
would  see  them  close  to  the  Marble  Arch 
on  any  fine  Sunday  afternoon,  preaching 
their  Movement  to  the  people  of  London. 

'You    are    all    damned,"     said    Eliphaz. 

'Your  portion  shall  be  damnation  for  ever- 
lasting." 

"All  damned,"  added  Ezekiel. 
Eliphaz  was  the  orator.  He  would  pic- 
ture Hell  to  you  as  it  really  is.  He  made 
you  see  pretty  much  what  it  will  be  like 
to  wriggle  and  turn  and  squirm,  and  never 
escape  from  burning.  But  Ezekiel  Pirn, 
though  he  seldom  said  more  than  three 
words,  uttered  those  words  with  such 
alarming  sincerity  and  had  such  a  sure  con- 
viction shining  in  his  eyes  that  searched 
right  in  your  face  as  he  said  them,  and  his 
long  hair  waved  so  weirdly  as  his  head  shot 
forward  when  he  said  "You're  all  damned", 
that  Ezekiel  Pirn  brought  home  to  you  that 


136  TALES  OF  WAR 

the  vivid  descriptions  of  Eliphaz  really 
applied  to  you. 

People  who  lead  bad  lives  get  their  sensi- 
bilities hardened.  These  did  not  care  very 
much  what  Eliphaz  said.  But  girls  at 
school,  and  several  governesses,  and  even 
some  young  clergy,  were  very  much  af- 
fected. Eliphaz  Griggs  and  Ezekiel  Pirn 
seemed  to  bring  Hell  so  near  to  you.  You 
could  almost  feel  it  baking  the  Marble  Arch 
from  two  to  four  on  Sundays.  And  at  four 
o'clock  the  Surbiton  Branch  of  the  Inter- 
national Anarchists  used  to  come  along, 
and  Eliphaz  Griggs  and  Ezekiel  Pirn  would 
pack  up  their  flag  and  go,  for  the  pitch  be- 
longed to  the  Surbiton  people  till  six;  and 
the  crank  Movements  punctiliously  recog- 
nize each  other's  rights.  If  they  fought 
among  themselves,  which  is  quite  unthink- 
able, the  police  would  run  them  in ;  it  is 
the  one  thing  that  an  anarchist  in  England 
may  never  do. 

When  the  War  came  the  two  speakers 
doubled  their  efforts.  The  way  they  looked 


THE   MOVEMENT  137 

at  it  was  that  here  was  a  counter-attraction 
taking  people's  minds  off  the  subject  of 
their  own  damnation  just  as  they  had  got 
them  to  think  about  it.  Eliphaz  worked 
as  he  had  never  worked  before ;  he  spared 
nobody ;  but  it  was  still  Ezekiel  Pirn  who 
somehow  brought  it  most  home  to  them. 

One  fine  spring  afternoon  Eliphaz  Griggs 
was  speaking  at  his  usual  place  and  time ; 
he  had  wound  himself  up  wonderfully. 
"You  are  damned,"  he  was  saying,  "for 
ever  and  ever  and  ever.  Your  sins  have 
found  you  out.  Your  filthy  lives  will  be  as 
fuel  round  you  and  shall  burn  for  ever  and 
ever." 

"Look  here,"  said  a  Canadian  soldier  in 
the  crowd,  "we  shouldn't  allow  that  in 
Ottawa." 

"What?"  asked  an  English  girl. 

"Why,  telling  us  we're  all  damned  like 
that,"  he  said. 

"Oh,  this  is  England,"  she  said.  "They 
may  all  say  what  they  like  here." 

"You   are   all   damned,"    said    Ezekiel, 


138  TALES  OF  WAR 

jerking  forward  his  head  and  shoulders  till 
his  hair  flapped  out  behind.  "All,  all,  all 
damned." 

"I'm  damned  if  I  am,"  said  the  Canadian 
soldier. 

"Ah,"  said  Ezekiel,  and  a  sly  look  came 
into  his  face. 

Eliphaz  flamed  on.  :<Your  sins  are  re- 
membered. Satan  shall  grin  at  you.  He 
shall  heap  cinders  on  you  for  ever  and  ever. 
Woe  to  you,  filthy  livers.  Woe  to  you, 
sinners.  Hell  is  your  portion.  There  shall 
be  none  to  grieve  for  you.  You  shall  dwell 
in  torment  for  ages.  None  shall  be  spared, 
not  one.  Woe  everlasting  ....  Oh,  I  beg 
pardon,  gentlemen,  I'm  sure."  For  the 
Pacifists'  League  had  been  kept  waiting 
three  minutes.  It  was  their  turn  to-day  at 
four. 


XXVIII 

NATURE'S  CAD 

THE  claim  of  Professor  Grotius  Jan  Beek 
to  have  discovered,  or  learned,  the 
language  of  the  greater  apes  has  been  dem- 
onstrated clearly  enough.  He  is  not  the 
original  discoverer  of  the  fact  that  they 
have  what  may  be  said  to  correspond  with 
a  language  ;  nor  is  he  the  first  man  to  have 
lived  for  some  while  in  the  jungle  protected 
by  wooden  bars,  with  a  view  to  acquiring 
some  knowledge  of  the  meaning  of  the 
various  syllables  that  gorillas  appear  to 
utter.  If  so  crude  a  collection  of  sounds, 
amounting  to  less  than  a  hundred  words, 
if  words  they  are,  may  be  called  a  language, 
it  may  be  admitted  that  the  Professor  has 
learned  it,  as  his  recent  experiments  show. 
What  he  has  not  proved  is  his  assertion 
that  he  has  actually  conversed  with  a 

139 


140  TALES  OF  WAR 

gorilla,  or  by  signs,  or  grunts,  or  any  means 
whatever  obtained  an  insight,  as  he  put  it, 
into  its  mentality,  or,  as  we  should  put  it, 
its  point  of  view.  This  Professor  Beek 
claims  to  have  done ;  and  though  he  gives 
us  a  certain  plausible  corroboration  of  a 
kind  which  makes  his  story  appear  likely, 
it  should  be  borne  in  mind  that  it  is  not  of 
the  nature  of  proof. 

The  Professor's  story  is  briefly  that  hav- 
ing acquired  this  language,  which  nobody 
that  has  witnessed  his  experiments  will  call 
in  question,  he  went  back  to  the  jungle  for 
a  week,  living  all  the  time  in  the  ordinary 
explorer's  cage  of  the  Blik  pattern. 
Towards  the  very  end  of  the  week  a  big 
male  gorilla  came  by,  and  the  Professor 
attracted  it  by  the  one  word  "Food."  It 
came,  he  says,  close  to  the  cage,  and  seemed 
prepared  to  talk  but  became  very  angry  on 
seeing  a  man  there,  and  beat  the  cage  and 
would  say  nothing.  The  Professor  says 
that  he  asked  it  why  it  was  angry.  He 
admits  that  he  had  learned  no  more  than 


NATURE'S   CAD  141 

forty  words  of  this  language,  but  believes 
that  there  are  perhaps  thirty  more.  Much 
however  is  expressed,  as  he  says,  by  mere 
intonation.  Anger,  for  instance ;  and 
scores  of  allied  words,  such  as  terrible, 
frightful,  kill,  whether  noun,  verb  or  ad- 
jective, are  expressed,  he  says,  by  a  mere 
growl.  Nor  is  there  any  word  for  "Why", 
but  queries  are  signified  by  the  inflexion 
of  the  voice. 

When  he  asked  it  why  it  was  angry  the 
gorilla  said  that  men  killed  him,  and  added 
a  noise  that  the  professor  said  was  evi- 
dently meant  to  allude  to  guns.  The  only 
word  used,  he  says,  in  this  remark  of  the 
gorilla's  was  the  word  that  signified  "man." 
The  sentence  as  understood  by  the  pro- 
fessor amounted  to  "Man  kill  me.  Guns." 
But  the  word  "kill"  was  represented  simply 
by  a  snarl,  "me"  by  slapping  its  chest,  and 
"guns"  as  I  have  explained  was  only  repre- 
sented by  a  noise.  The  Professor  believes 
that  ultimately  a  word  for  guns  may  be 
evolved  out  of  that  noise,  but  thinks  that 


142  TALES  OF  WAR 

it  will  take  many  centuries,  and  that  if 
during  that  time  guns  should  cease  to  be 
in  use,  this  stimulus  being  withdrawn,  the 
word  will  never  be  evolved  at  all,  nor  of 
course  will  it  be  needed. 

The  Professor  tried,  by  evincing  interest, 
ignorance,  and  incredulity,  and  even  in- 
dignation, to  encourage  the  gorilla  to  say 
more ;  but  to  his  disappointment,  all  the 
more  intense  after  having  exchanged  that 
one  word  of  conversation  with  one  of  the 
beasts,  the  gorilla  only  repeated  what  it 
had  said,  and  beat  on  the  cage  again.  For 
half  an  hour  this  went  on,  the  Professor 
showing  every  sign  of  sympathy,  the  gorilla 
raging  and  beating  upon  the  cage. 

It  was  half  an  hour  of  the  most  intense 
excitement  to  the  Professor,  during  which 
time  he  saw  the  realization  of  dreams  that 
many  considered  crazy,  glittering  as  it  were 
within  his  grasp,  and  all  the  while  this 
ridiculous  gorilla  would  do  nothing  but 
repeat  the  mere  shred  of  a  sentence  and 
beat  the  cage  with  its  great  hands ;  and 


NATURE'S   CAD  143 

the  heat  of  course  was  intense.  And  by 
the  end  of  the  half  hour  the  excitement  and 
the  heat  seem  to  have  got  the  better  of  the 
Professor's  temper,  and  he  waved  the  dis- 
gusting brute  angrily  away  with  a  gesture 
that  probably  was  not  much  less  impatient 
than  the  gorilla's  own.  And  at  that  the 
animal  suddenly  became  voluble.  He  beat 
more  furiously  than  ever  upon  the  cage 
and  slipped  his  great  fingers  through  the 
bars,  trying  to  reach  the  Professor,  and 
poured  out  volumes  of  ape-chatter. 

Why,  why  did  men  shoot  at  him,  he 
asked.  He  made  himself  terrible,  there- 
fore men  ought  to  love  him.  That  was 
the  whole  burden  of  what  the  Professor 
calls  its  argument.  "Me,  me  terrible," 
two  slaps  on  the  chest  and  then  a  growl. 
"Man  love  me."  And  then  the  emphatic 
negative  word,  and  the  sound  that  meant 
guns,  and  sudden  furious  rushes  at  the 
cage  to  try  to  get  at  the  Professor. 

The  gorilla,  Professor  Beek  explains, 
evidently  admired  only  strength ;  when- 


144  TALES   OF  WAR 

ever  he  said  "I  make  myself  terrible  to 
Man,"  a  sentence  he  often  repeated,  he 
drew  himself  up  and  thrust  out  his  huge 
chest  and  bared  his  frightful  teeth ;  and 
certainly,  the  Professor  says,  there  was 
something  terribly  grand  about  the  menac- 
ing brute.  "Me  terrible,"  he  repeated 
again  and  again,  "Me  terrible.  Sky,  sun, 
stars  with  me.  Man  love  me.  Man  love 
me.  No?"  It  meant  that  all  the  great 
forces  of  nature  Cassis  ted  him  and  his  terrible 
teeth,  which  he  gnashed  repeatedly,  and 
that  therefore  man  should  love  him,  and 
he  opened  his  great  jaws  wide  as  he  said 
this,  showing  all  the  brutal  force  of  them. 

There  was  to  my  mind  a  genuine  ring  in 
Professor  Beek's  story,  because  he  was 
obviously  so  much  more  concerned,  and 
really  troubled,  by  the  dreadful  depravity 
of  this  animal's  point  of  view,  or  mentality 
as  he  called  it,  than  he  was  concerned  with 
whether  or  not  we  believed  what  he  had 
said. 

And  I  mentioned  that  there  was  a  cir- 


NATURE'S   CAD  145 

cumstance  in  his  story  of  a  plausible  and 
even  corroborative  nature.  It  is  this. 
Professor  Beek,  who  noticed  at  the  time  a 
bullet  wound  in  the  tip  of  the  gorilla's  left 
ear,  by  means  of  which  it  was  luckily 
identified,  put  his  analysis  of  its  mentality 
in  writing  and  showed  it  to  several  others, 
before  he  had  any  way  of  accounting  for 
the  beast  having  such  a  mind. 

Long  afterwards  it  was  definitely  as- 
certained that  this  animal  had  been  caught 
when  young  on  the  slopes  of  Kilimanjaro 
and  trained  and  even  educated,  so  far  as 
such  things  are  possible,  by  an  eminent 
German  Professor,  a  persona  grata  at  the 
Court  of  Berlin. 


XXIX 

THE  HOME  OF  HERR  SCHNITZEL- 
HAASER 

THE  guns  in  the  town  of  Greinstein 
were  faintly  audible.  The  family  of 
Schnitzelhaaser  lived  alone  there  in  mourn- 
ing, an  old  man  and  old  woman.  They 
never  went  out  or  saw  any  one,  for  they 
knew  they  could  not  speak  as  though  they 
did  not  mourn.  They  feared  that  their 
secret  would  escape  them.  They  had  never 
cared  for  the  war  that  the  War  Lord  made. 
They  no  longer  cared  what  he  did  with  it. 
They  never  read  his  speeches ;  they  never 
hung  out  flags  when  he  ordered  flags :  they 
hadn't  the  heart  to. 

They  had  had  four  sons. 

The  lonely  old  couple  would  go  as  far  as 
the  shop  for  food.  Hunger  stalked  behind 
them.  They  just  beat  hunger  every  day, 

146 


HERR   SCHNITZELHAASER     147 

and  so  saw  evening :  but  there  was  nothing 
to  spare.  Otherwise  they  did  not  go  out 
at  all.  Hunger  had  been  coming  slowly 
nearer  of  late.  They  had  nothing  but  the 
ration,  and  the  ration  was  growing  smaller. 
They  had  one  pig  of  their  own,  but  the  law 
said  you  might  not  kill  it.  So  the  pig  was 
no  good  to  them. 

They  used  to  go  and  look  at  that  pig 
sometimes  when  hunger  pinched.  But 
more  than  that  they  did  not  dare  to  con- 
template. 

Hunger  came  nearer  and  nearer.  The 
war  was  going  to  end  by  the  first  of  July. 
The  War  Lord  was  going  to  take  Paris  on 
this  day  and  that  would  end  the  war  at 
once.  But  then  the  war  was  always  going 
to  end.  It  was  going  to  end  in  1914,  and 
their  four  sons  were  to  have  come  home 
when  the  leaves  fell.  The  War  Lord  had 
promised  that.  And  even  if  it  did  end,  that 
would  not  bring  their  four  sons  home  now. 
So  what  did  it  matter  what  the  War  Lord 
said. 


148  TALES  OF  WAR 

It  was  thoughts  like  these  that  they 
knew  they  had  to  conceal.  It  was  because 
of  thoughts  like  these  that  they  did  not 
trust  themselves  to  go  out  and  see  other 
people,  for  they  feared  that  by  their  looks 
if  by  nothing  else,  or  by  their  silence  or 
perhaps  their  tears,  they  might  imply  a 
blasphemy  against  the  All  Highest.  And 
hunger  made  one  so  hasty.  What  might 
one  not  say?  And  so  they  stayed  in- 
doors. 

But  now.  What  would  happen  now? 
The  War  Lord  was  coming  to  Greinstein  in 
order  to  hear  the  guns.  One  officer  of  the 
staff  was  to  be  billeted  in  their  house.  And 
what  would  happen  now? 

They  talked  the  whole  thing  over.  They 
must  struggle  and  make  an  effort.  The 
officer  would  be  there  for  one  evening. 
He  would  leave  in  the  morning  quite  early 
in  order  to  make  things  ready  for  the  return 
to  Potsdam :  he  had  charge  of  the  imperial 
car.  So  for  one  evening  they  must  be 
merry.  They  would  suppose,  it  was  Herr 


HERR  SCHNITZELHAASER    149 

Schnitzelhaaser's  suggestion,  they  would 
think  all  the  evening  that  Belgium  and 
France  and  Luxemburg  all  attacked  the 
Fatherland,  and  that  the  Kaiser,  utterly 
unprepared,  quite  unprepared,  called  on  the 
Germans  to  defend  their  land  against 
Belgium. 

Yes,  the  old  woman  could  imagine  that ; 
she  could  think  it  all  the  evening. 

And  then, —  it  was  no  use  not  being  cheer- 
ful altogether,  —  then  one  must  imagine 
a  little  more,  just  for  the  evening :  it  would 
come  quite  easy ;  one  must  think  that  the 
four  boys  were  alive. 

Hans  too  ?     (Hans  was  the  youngest.) 

Yes,  all  four.     Just  for  the  evening. 

But  if  the  officer  asks  ? 

He  will  not  ask.     What  are  four  soldiers  ? 

So  it  was  all  arranged  ;  and  at  evening  the 
officer  came.  He  brought  his  own  rations, 
so  hunger  came  no  nearer.  Hunger  just 
lay  down  outside  the  door  and  did  not 
notice  the  officer. 

At  his  supper  the  officer  began  to  talk. 


150  TALES  OF  WAR 

The  Kaiser  himself,  he  said,  was  at  the 
Schartzhaus. 

"So,"  said  Herr  Schnitzelhaaser ;  "just 
over  the  way.'*  So  close.  Such  an  honour. 

And  indeed  the  shadow  of  the  Schartz- 
haus darkened  their  garden  in  the  morning. 

It  was  such  an  honour,  said  Frau  Schnitz- 
elhaaser too.  And  they  began  to  praise  the 
Kaiser.  So  great  a  War  Lord,  she  said ; 
the  most  glorious  war  there  had  ever  been. 

Of  course,  said  the  officer,  it  would  end 
on  the  first  of  July. 

Of  course,  said  Frau  Schnitzelhaaser. 
And  so  great  an  admiral,  too.  One  must 
remember  that  also.  And  how  fortunate 
we  were  to  have  him :  one  must  not  forget 
that.  Had  it  not  been  for  him  the  crafty 
Belgians  would  have  attacked  the  Father- 
land, but  they  were  struck  down  before 
they  could  do  it.  So  much  better  to  pre- 
vent a  bad  deed  like  that  than  merely  to 
punish  after.  So  wise.  And  had  it  not 
been  for  him,  if  it  had  not  been  for  him  .  .  . 

The  old  man  saw  that  she  was  breaking 


HERR  SCHNITZELHAASER    151 

down  and  hastily  he  took  up  that  feverish 
praise.  Feverish  it  was,  for  their  hunger 
and  bitter  loss  affected  their  minds  no  less 
than  illness  does,  and  the  things  they  did 
they  did  hastily  and  in  temperately.  His 
praise  of  the  War  Lord  raced  on  as  the 
officer  ate.  He  spoke  of  him  as  of  those 
that  benefit  man,  as  of  monarchs  who 
bring  happiness  to  their  people.  And  now, 
he  said,  he  is  here  in  the  Schartzhaus  beside 
us,  listening  to  the  guns  just  like  a  common 
soldier. 

Finally  the  guns,  as  he  spoke,  coughed 
beyond  ominous  hills.  Contentedly  the 
officer  went  on  eating.  He  suspected  noth- 
ing of  the  thoughts  his  host  and  hostess  were 
hiding.  At  last  he  went  upstairs  to  bed. 

As  fierce  exertion  is  easy  to  the  fevered, 
so  they  had  spoken ;  and  it  wears  them,  so 
they  were  worn.  The  old  woman  wept 
when  the  officer  went  out  of  hearing.  But 
old  Herr  Schnitzelhaaser  picked  up  a  big 
butcher's  knife.  "I  will  bear  it  no  more," 
he  said. 


152  TALES   OF  WAR 

His  wife  watched  him  in  silence  as  he 
went  away  with  his  knife.  Out  of  the  house 
he  went  and  into  the  night.  Through  the 
open  door  she  saw  nothing;  all  was  dark; 
even  the  Schartzhaus,  where  all  was  gay 
to-night,  stood  dark  for  fear  of  aeroplanes. 
The  old  woman  waited  in  silence. 

When  Herr  Schnitzelhaaser  returned 
there  was  blood  on  his  knife. 

"What  have  you  done?"  the  old  woman 
asked  him  quite  calmly.  "I  have  killed  our 
pig,"  he  said. 

She  broke  out  then,  all  the  more  recklessly 
for  the  long  restraint  of  the  evening ;  the 
officer  must  have  heard  her. 

"We  are  lost !  We  are  lost !"  she  cried. 
"We  may  not  kill  our  pig.  Hunger  has 
made  you  mad.  You  have  ruined  us." 

"I  will  bear  it  no  longer,"  he  said.  "I 
have  killed  our  pig." 

"But  they  will  never  let  us  eat  it,"  she 
cried.  "Oh,  you  have  ruined  us!" 

"If  you  did  not  dare  to  kill  our  pig,"  he 
said,  "why  did  you  not  stop  me  when  you 


HERR  SCHNITZELHAASER      153 

saw   me   go?     You   saw  me   go  with  the 
knife?" 

"I  thought,"  she  said,  "you  were  going 
to  kill  the  Kaiser." 


XXX 

A  DEED  OF  MERCY 

AS  Hindenburg  and  the  Kaiser  came 
down,  as  we  read,  from  Mont 
d'Hiver,  during  the  recent  offensive,  they 
saw  on  the  edge  of  a  crater  two  wounded 
British  soldiers.  The  Kaiser  ordered  that 
they  should  be  cared  for :  their  wounds 
were  bound  up  and  they  were  given  brandy, 
and  brought  round  from  unconsciousness. 
That  is  the  German  account  of  it,  and  it 
may  well  be  true.  It  was  a  kindly  act. 

Probably  had  it  not  been  for  this  the  two 
men  would  have  died  among  those  desolate 
craters ;  no  one  would  have  known,  and  no 
one  could  have  been  blamed  for  it. 

The  contrast  of  this  spark  of  imperial 
kindness  against  the  gloom  of  the  back- 
ground of  the  war  that  the  Kaiser  made  is 
a  pleasant  thing  to  see,  even  though  it 
154 


A   DEED   OF   MERCY          155 

illuminates  for  only  a  moment  the  savage 
darkness  in  which  our  days  are  plunged. 
It  was  a  kindness  that  probably  will  long 
be  remembered  to  him.  Even  we,  his 
enemies,  will  remember  it.  And  who  knows 
but  that  when  most  he  needs  it  his  reward 
for  the  act  will  be  given  him. 

For  Judas,  they  say,  once  in  his  youth, 
gave  his  cloak,  out  of  compassion,  to  a 
shivering  beggar,  who  sat  shaken  with  ague, 
in  rags,  in  bitter  need.  And  the  years  went 
by  and  Judas  forgot  his  deed.  And  long 
after,  in  Hell,  Judas  they  say  was  given  one 
day's  respite  at  the  end  of  every  year  be- 
cause of  this  one  kindness  he  had  done  so 
long  since  in  his  youth.  And  every  year 
he  goes,  they  say,  for  a  day  and  cools  him- 
self among  the  Arctic  bergs ;  once  every 
year  for  century  after  century. 

Perhaps  some  sailor  on  watch  on  a  misty 
evening  blown  far  out  of  his  course  away  to 
the  north  saw  something  ghostly  once  on 
an  iceberg  floating  by,  or  heard  some  voice 
in  the  dimness  that  seemed  like  the  voice 


156  TALES  OF  WAR 

of  man,  and  came  home  with  this  weird 
story.  And  perhaps,  as  the  story  passed 
from  lip  to  lip,  men  found  enough  justice 
in  it  to  believe  it  true.  So  it  came  down 
the  centuries. 

Will  seafarers  ages  hence  on  dim  October 
evenings,  or  on  nights  when  the  moon  is 
ominous  through  mist,  red  and  huge  and 
uncanny,  see  a  lonely  figure  sometimes  on 
the  loneliest  part  of  the  sea,  far  north  of 
where  the  Lusitania  sank,  gathering  all  the 
cold  it  can?  Will  they  see  it  hugging  a 
crag  of  iceberg  wan  as  itself,  helmet,  cuirass 
and  ice  pale-blue  in  the  mist  together? 
Will  it  look  towards  them  with  ice-blue 
eyes  through  the  mist,  and  will  they  ques- 
tion it,  meeting  on  those  bleak  seas  ?  Will 
it  answer  —  or  will  the  North  Wind  howl 
like  voices  ?  Will  the  cry  of  seals  be  heard, 
and  ice  floes  grinding,  and  strange  birds  lost 
upon  the  wind  that  night,  or  will  it  speak  to 
them  in  those  distant  years  and  tell  them 
how  it  sinned,  betraying  man  ? 

It  will  be  a  grim,  dark  story  in  that  lonely 


A   DEED   OF  MERCY          157 

part  of  the  sea,  when  he  confesses  to  sailors, 
blown  too  far  north,  the  dreadful  thing  he 
plotted  against  man.  The  date  on  which 
he  is  seen  will  be  told  from  sailor  to  sailor. 
Queer  taverns  of  distant  harbours  will  know 
it  well.  Not  many  will  care  to  be  at  sea 
that  day,  and  few  will  risk  being  driven  by 
stress  of  weather  on  the  Kaiser's  night  to 
the  bergs  of  the  haunted  part  of  sea. 

And  yet  for  all  the  grimness  of  the  pale- 
blue  phantom,  with  cuirass  and  helmet  and 
eyes  shimmering  on  deadly  icebergs,  and 
yet  for  all  the  sorrow  of  the  wrong  he  did 
against  man,  the  women  drowned  and  the 
children,  and  all  the  good  ships  gone,  yet 
will  the  horrified  mariners  meeting  him  in 
the  mist  grudge  him  no  moment  of  the  day 
he  has  earned,  or  the  coolness  he  gains  from 
the  bergs,  because  of  the  kindness  he  did  to 
the  wounded  men.  For  the  mariners  in 
their  hearts  are  kindly  men,  and  what  a 
soul  gains  from  kindness  will  seem  to  them 
well  deserved. 


XXXI 

LAST   SCENE   OF  ALL 

AFTER  John  Calleron  was  hit  he  carried 
on  in  a  kind  of  twilight  of  the  mind. 
Things  grew  dimmer  and  calmer;  harsh 
outlines  of  events  became  blurred ;  mem- 
ories came  to  him  ;  there  was  a  singing  in  his 
ears  like  far-off  bells.  Things  seemed  more 
beautiful  than  they  had  a  while  ago  ;  to  him 
it  was  for  all  the  world  like  evening  after 
some  quiet  sunset,  when  lawns  and  shrubs 
and  woods  and  some  old  spire  look  lovely 
in  the  late  light,  and  one  reflects  on  past 
days.  Thus  he  carried  on,  seeing  things 
dimly.  And  what  is  sometimes  called  "the 
roar  of  battle ",  those  aerial  voices  that 
snarl  and  moan  and  whine  and  rage  at 
soldiers,  had  grown  dimmer  too.  It  all 
seemed  further  away,  and  littler,  as  far 
things  are.  He  still  heard  the  bullets : 

158 


LAST   SCENE   OF   ALL         159 

there  is  something  so  violently  and  intensely 
sharp  in  the  snap  of  passing  bullets  at  short 
ranges  that  you  hear  them  in  deepest 
thought,  and  even  in  dreams.  He  heard 
them,  tearing  by,  above  all  things  else. 
The  rest  seemed  fainter  and  dimmer,  and 
smaller  and  further  away. 

He  did  not  think  he  was  very  badly  hit, 
but  nothing  seemed  to  matter  as  it  did  a 
while  ago.  Yet  he  carried  on. 

And  then  he  opened  his  eyes  very  wide 
and  found  he  was  back  in  London  again  in 
an  underground  train.  He  knew  it  at  once 
by  the  look  of  it.  He  had  made  hundreds 
of  journeys,  long  ago,  by  those  trains.  He 
knew  by  the  dark,  outside,  that  it  had  not 
yet  left  London;  but  what  was  odder  than 
that,  if  one  stopped  to  think  of  it,  was  that 
he  knew  exactly  where  it  was  going.  It  was 
the  train  that  went  away  out  into  the 
country  where  he  used  to  live  as  a  boy. 
He  was  sure  of  that  without  thinking. 

When  he  began  to  think  how  he  came  to 
be  there  he  remembered  the  war  as  a  very 


160  TALES  OF  WAR 

far-off  thing.  He  supposed  he  had  been 
unconscious  a  very  long  time.  He  was  all 
right  now. 

Other  people  were  sitting  beside  him  on 
the  same  seat.  They  all  seemed  like 
people  he  remembered  a  very  long  time 
ago.  In  the  darkness  opposite,  beyond  the 
windows  of  the  train,  he  could  see  their 
reflections  clearly.  He  looked  at  the  re- 
flections but  could  not  quite  remember. 

A  woman  was  sitting  on  his  left.  She 
was  quite  young.  She  was  more  like  some 
one  that  he  most  deeply  remembered  than 
all  the  others  were.  He  gazed  at  her,  and 
tried  to  clear  his  mind. 

He  did  not  turn  and  stare  at  her,  but  he 
quietly  watched  her  reflection  before  him 
hi  the  dark.  Every  detail  of  her  dress,  her 
young  face,  her  hat,  the  little  ornaments  she 
wore,  were  minutely  clear  before  him,  look- 
ing out  of  the  dark.  So  contented  she  looked 
you  would  say  she  was  untouched  by  war. 

As  he  gazed  at  the  clear  calm  face  and  the 
dress  that  seemed  neat  though  old  and,  like 


LAST  SCENE   OF  ALL         161 

all  things,  so  far  away,  his  mind  grew  clearer 
and  clearer.  It  seemed  to  him  certain  it 
was  the  face  of  his  mother,  but  from  thirty 
years  ago,  out  of  old  memories  and  one 
picture.  He  felt  sure  it  was  his  mother  as 
she  had  been  when  he  was  very  small.  And 
yet  after  thirty  years  how  could  he  know? 
He  puzzled  to  try  and  be  quite  sure.  But 
how  she  came  to  be  there,  looking  like  that, 
out  of  those  oldest  memories,  he  did  not 
think  of  at  all. 

He  seemed  to  be  hugely  tired  by  many 
things  and  did  not  want  to  think.  Yet  he 
was  very  happy,  more  happy  even  than  tired 
men  just  come  home  all  new  to  comfort. 

He  gazed  and  gazed  at  the  face  in  the 
dark.  And  then  he  felt  quite  sure. 

He  was  about  to  speak.  Was  she  looking 
at  him?  Was  she  watching  him,  he  won- 
dered. He  glanced  for  the  first  time  to  his 
own  reflection  in  that  clear  row  of  faces. 

His  own  reflection  was  not  there,  but 
blank  dark  showed  between  his  two  neigh- 
bours. And  then  he  knew  he  was  dead. 


XXXII 
OLD  ENGLAND 

TOWARDS  winter's  end  on  a  high,  big, 
bare  down,  in  the  south  of  England, 
John  Plowman  was  ploughing.  He  was 
ploughing  the  brown  field  at  the  top  of  the 
hill,  good  soil  of  the  clay ;  a  few  yards  lower 
down  was  nothing  but  chalk,  with  shallow 
flinty  soil  and  steep  to  plough ;  so  they  let 
briars  grow  there.  For  generations  his 
forbears  had  ploughed  on  the  top  of  that 
hill.  John  did  not  know  how  many.  The 
hills  were  very  old;  it  might  have  been 
always. 

He  scarcely  looked  to  see  if  his  furrow 
was  going  straight.  The  work  he  was  do- 
ing was  so  much  in  his  blood  that  he  could 
almost  feel  if  furrows  were  straight  or  not. 
Year  after  year  they  moved  on  the  same  old 
landmarks ;  thorn  trees  and  briars  mostly 

162 


OLD   ENGLAND  163 

guided  the  plough,  where  they  stood  on  the 
untamed  land  beyond ;  the  thorn  trees  grew 
old  at  their  guiding,  and  still  the  furrows 
varied  not  by  the  breadth  of  a  hoof-mark. 

John,  as  he  ploughed,  had  leisure  to 
meditate  on  much  besides  the  crops ;  he 
knew  so  much  of  the  crops  that  his  thoughts 
could  easily  run  free  from  them ;  he  used  to 
meditate  on  who  they  were  that  lived  in 
briar  and  thorn  tree,  and  danced  as  folk 
said  all  through  midsummer  night,  and 
sometimes  blessed  and  sometimes  harmed 
the  crops ;  for  he  knew  that  in  Old  Eng- 
land were  wonderful  ancient  things,  odder 
and  older  things  than  many  folks  knew. 
And  his  eyes  had  leisure  to  see  much  be- 
side the  furrows,  for  he  could  almost  feel 
the  furrows  going  straight. 

One  day  at  his  ploughing,  as  he  watched 
the  thorn  ahead,  he  saw  the  whole  big  hill 
besides,  looking  south,  and  the  lands  below 
it ;  one  day  he  saw  in  the  bright  sun  of  late 
winter  a  horseman  riding  the  road  through 
the  wide  lands  below.  The  horseman  shone 


164  TALES  OF  WAR 

as  he  rode,  and  wore  white  linen  over  what 
was  shining,  and  on  the  linen  was  a  big 
red  cross.  "One  of  them  knights,"  John 
Plowman  said  to  himself  or  his  horse,  "go- 
ing to  them  crusades."  And  he  went  on 
with  his  ploughing  all  that  day  satisfied, 
and  remembered  what  he  had  seen  for  years, 
and  told  his  son. 

For  there  is  in  England,  and  there  always 
was,  mixed  with  the  needful  things  that  feed 
or  shelter  the  race,  the  wanderer-feeling  for 
romantic  causes  that  runs  deep  and  strange 
through  the  other  thoughts,  as  the  Gulf 
Stream  runs  through  the  sea.  Sometimes 
generations  of  John  Plowman's  family 
would  go  by  and  no  high  romantic  cause 
would  come  to  sate  that  feeling.  They 
would  work  on  just  the  same  though  a  little 
sombrely,  as  though  some  good  thing  had 
been  grudged  them.  And  then  the  Cru- 
sades had  come,  and  John  Plowman  had 
seen  the  Red  Cross  knight  go  by,  riding 
towards  the  sea  in  the  morning,  and  John 
Plowman  was  satisfied. 


OLD   ENGLAND  165 

Some  generations  later  a  man  of  the  same 
name  was  ploughing  the  same  hill.  They 
still  ploughed  the  brown  clay  at  the  top  and 
left  the  slope  wild,  though  there  were  many 
changes.  And  the  furrows  were  wonder- 
fully straight  still.  And  half  he  watched  a 
thorn  tree  ahead  as  he  ploughed  and  half 
he  took  in  the  whole  hill  sloping  south  and 
the  wide  lands  below  it,  far  beyond  which 
was  the  sea.  They  had  a  railway  now  down 
in  the  valley.  The  sunlight  glittering  near 
the  end  of  winter  shone  on  a  train  that  was 
marked  with  great  white  squares  and  red 
crosses  on  them. 

John  Plowman  stopped  his  horses  and 
looked  at  the  train.  "An  ambulance 
train,"  he  said,  "coming  up  from  the  coast." 
He  thought  of  the  lads  he  knew  and  won- 
dered if  any  were  there.  He  pitied  the  men 
in  that  train  and  envied  them.  And  then 
there  came  to  him  the  thought  of  England's 
cause  and  of  how  those  men  had  upheld  it, 
at  sea  and  in  crumbling  cities.  He  thought 
of  the  battle  whose  echoes  reached  some- 


166  TALES  OF  WAR 

times  to  that  field,  whispering  to  furrows 
and  thorn  trees  that  had  never  heard 
them  before.  He  thought  of  the  accursed 
tyrant's  cruel  might,  and  of  the  lads  that 
had  faced  it.  He  saw  the  romantic  splen- 
dour of  England's  cause.  He  was  old  but 
had  seen  the  glamour  for  which  each 
generation  looked.  Satisfied  in  his  heart 
and  cheered  with  a  new  content  he  went 
on  with  his  age-old  task  in  the  business  of 
man  with  the  hills. 


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